You Don’t Have a Supply Chain Problem—You Have a Leadership Gap

Still treating your supply chain like a cost center? That mindset’s a liability. We’re not “weathering chaos” anymore — this is the climate. Supply chain isn’t a back-office function; it’s your value engine. The sooner you stop managing it like overhead and start optimizing it like a performance lever, the sooner you stop bleeding relevance.

Over the last five years, every illusion we had about supply chains being some back-office utility has collapsed under the weight of global disruption. They’re no longer the quiet, invisible force behind your operations. They’re your risk strategy, your growth engine, your resilience plan, and increasingly, your competitive edge.

The idea that the supply chain isn’t strategic is no longer just outdated; it’s straight up dangerous. And if it’s not at the table when strategy gets set, you’re playing the game with one eye closed and your best player on the bench.

This week, I sat down with Greg Toornman - who’s navigated everything from agricultural networks to global automotive logistics, to talk about what it actually takes to shift from reactive scrambling to proactive, scalable value creation. And here’s your sneak peek: it starts with killing the term “supply chain” altogether.

Let’s Call It What It Really Is: Your Value Chain

Greg didn’t mince words. If you're still calling it a supply chain, you’re already stuck in the wrong mindset. That term belongs to an era of spreadsheets, fire drills, and just-in-time wish casting. What we need now is a value chain—something designed not just to move products, but to deliver outcomes that matter and make the business thrive.

A true value chain doesn’t just track boxes from point A to B. It supports differentiated customer experiences, enables market expansion, and absorbs volatility with intent. The difference is it’s not built on fear of disruption—it’s built to expect it, manage it, and grow through it. Oh, and it has very little to do with technology. More on that in a bit.

Firefighting Isn’t Strategy. Visibility Is.

Ask any operations leader what they need most, and they’ll say visibility, but not the kind that lives in a dashboard and dies in a meeting. Real visibility is the ability to sense risk early and respond fast before the cracks turn into chasms. It has a signal, not just noise, context, or data.

Greg was crystal clear on this part: time is your most expensive asset, and most companies burn it like they’ve got a limitless pile in the back. If you're constantly in reaction mode, you’re already too late. Resilience starts by giving your team a playbook they know how to run, not a fire extinguisher, and good luck.

Too many teams are stuck in a loop of reacting instead of planning. Every day becomes a scramble. Expediting last-minute shipments, plugging surprise inventory gaps, apologizing to customers for delays you didn’t cause, chasing down rogue vendors who suddenly forgot the definition of “lead time.”

It’s honestly exhausting. It’s expensive. And worse, it’s totally avoidable. When your supply chain runs on emergencies, you don’t have a strategy; you have a smoke alarm. And the longer you normalize that chaos, the more you start rewarding a very specific main character: the Supply Chain Hero.

You know the one. The person who’s always “saving the day.” They know who to call, how to pivot, and where to reroute. They pull miracles out of spreadsheets at 10 PM and make sure the truck somehow leaves the dock. And yeah — sometimes that is a huge flex. It’s fast-paced, dramatic, even addictive. But it’s also a trap.

Because heroism in supply chain is usually just a band-aid on bad systems, it might look like high performance, but it’s really just a workaround for the fact that nothing’s working. A supply chain shouldn’t need a cape. It needs processes, predictability, and performance visibility — the kind that doesn’t hinge on one person burning out while holding the entire thing together with Teams messages and crossed fingers.

Enter Playbooks, Not Panic: What Real Preparedness Looks Like

This isn’t about hypothetical what-ifs or impressive slides labeled “contingency planning.” Greg’s team didn’t just talk preparedness, they lived it through practiced dec. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed and sent ripple effects across shipping lanes, they didn’t flinch. They rerouted cargo in real-time. Not because someone pulled an all-nighter fueled by panic and caffeine, but because the scenario had already been modeled. The decision points were already clear. The supplier relationships were already strong.

None of that happened by accident. It was the result of a strategy that took supply chain seriously. Or one that treated it as a dynamic partner to the business rather than a reactive cost center. And because they’d done the work up front, what could’ve been a six-figure delay turned into a fulfillment win. No scrambling. No heroics. Just a well-executed plan doing what it was built to do: protect the business.

Too often, supply chain conversations turn into a blame game: “The darn supplier messed up the shipment again.” “Our lead times are a disaster because of them.” “If they’d just do their job…”

Sound familiar? That kind of thinking turns suppliers into scapegoats — when what we actually need are strategic partners. I personally find Greg’s approach so refreshing. He doesn’t treat suppliers like necessary evils. He treats them like core collaborators and critical players in the performance and resilience of the entire operation.

Instead of pushing suppliers to the edge of the map and calling them when things go south, Greg builds them into the design from day one. They’re part of the resilience planning, risk modeling, capacity discussions, and even innovation loops.

Because the reality is, if you’re pressure-testing your supply chain and your suppliers aren’t in the room, you’re not testing the real thing. Greg’s mindset shifts the dynamic from reactive to proactive — from transactional to transformative. It’s not just “do this faster” or “fix this order” — it’s “how do we win together?” And in this economy, that mindset is a competitive advantage.

That’s the real difference between maturity and motion. One reacts. The other anticipates. One hopes things go smoothly. The other builds the muscle to flex when they don’t.

AI Can’t Help You If Your Data Is Garbage

Yes, we got to AI. Of course, we did. But not before we talked about the mess hiding behind the curtain—because if your data is inconsistent, your processes undocumented, and your teams still drowning in manual busywork, then layering AI on top is like installing a GPS on a shopping cart with a broken wheel.

Greg made another great point: before you start dreaming about predictive analytics, automated decision-making, or real-time optimization, you need to clean house. That means harmonizing data across systems, defining a common language, and freeing your people from workflows that treat their judgment like an afterthought.

AI doesn’t create strategy, it accelerates what already exists. It amplifies the awful. If what you have is misalignment, chaos, or noise, then all AI will do is get you there faster. And by “there,” I mean late shipments, rising costs, and a dashboard full of fiction.

The Leadership Shift: Empower People Who Know What to Do

Here’s where the conversation with Greg got even more interesting: the real differentiator in supply chain success isn’t a tool, a system, or a sparkly new dashboard; it’s leadership. LOUDER FOR THOSE IN THE BACK. Not the kind that micromanages from the top down, but the kind that deliberately cultivates a culture where people are trusted to think, move, and make decisions without a permission slip.

Greg introduced the concept of “water spiders”- cross-functional operators who move with intention across teams, spending peacetime on process improvement and springing into action when things go sideways. If you’ve seen my TikToks, this is Jim. Now, these aren’t those fire marshals waiting for alarms. They’re embedded connectors who already know the players, the playbook, and the rules of the game, and can pivot the moment the field shifts beneath them.

What makes them effective isn’t just their expertise; it’s that they’re empowered. They’ve earned trust by doing the work, building relationships, and knowing when to step in. They’re the kind of people who can get a call from Europe on a Tuesday, redirect a shipment by Wednesday, and have a resolution in place before the executive team even schedules a debrief.

They don’t ask for permission because they’ve already earned the right to lead. And if that sounds radical, it’s only because too many orgs are still clinging to old models of hierarchy instead of cultivating the kind of distributed intelligence that actually gets things done.

What a Pandemic Teaches You About Partnership

Long before PPE became a household acronym, Greg’s team was already in motion. In late 2019, as whispers about a strange outbreak in Wuhan began to surface, they started shipping protective equipment to their Chinese suppliers—not selling, not negotiating, just sending. Because they knew what most companies were too slow to realize: if your suppliers can’t operate, neither can you.

It wasn’t a gesture. It was a strategy rooted in trust, built on foresight, and executed without hesitation. That one move preserved production capacity, stabilized operations across multiple regions and created loyalty that outperformed any contract. It’s the kind of long game thinking that separates those who manage disruption from those who get managed by it.

Now, be so for real for a second—who do you know that was actually doing that?

NO ONE.

Everyone was scrambling. Companies were still figuring out how to spell “N95” while Greg’s team had already shipped pallets of PPE to their suppliers. Not their warehouses. Not their executives. Their partners on the other side of the planet, who they knew would be on the front lines of any supply disruption.

Most organizations were still stuck in contract renegotiations, panicking over tier-2 visibility, or waiting for someone in procurement to send out a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, Greg was playing chess five moves ahead.

Technology That Actually Delivers (If You’re Ready to Use It)

Let’s get something straight: automation isn’t the future. It’s the present. Predictive maintenance, digital twins, AI-powered transportation logic—these tools aren’t bleeding-edge anymore. They’re ready. The real question is whether your organization is.

One of Greg’s teams swapped out a traditional human-led routing process with a system that automated decisions and escalated only the edge cases. Thousands of shipments moved without friction. No bottlenecks. No red tape. And the people who used to spend their days chasing approvals? They got promoted. Because when you give smart people space to think instead of babysitting broken processes, they start creating real value.

Global Strategy, Local Trust

Geopolitical risk. Multi-region redundancy. Nearshoring. Offshoring. Reshoring. You’ve heard the buzzwords. But none of it means anything if your teams don’t trust each other enough to talk straight and solve problems fast.

Greg’s teams didn’t need cultural translation manuals, they’d built real relationships. They knew each other’s families, shared meals, traded stories. So when something went sideways—and it always does—they had the foundation to move together instead of freeze apart.

When someone flagged a misstep or a cultural miss, the reaction wasn’t defensiveness. It was curiosity. That kind of psychological safety doesn’t happen by accident. It’s designed. It’s maintained. And in a crisis, it performs.

Closing Byte

You can invest in software. You can revamp org charts. You can rewrite your KPIs until they sparkle. But if your people aren’t trusted, your data isn’t clean, and your culture isn’t aligned around proactive action, then you’re just running laps around the same problem.

A modern supply chain isn’t just a function; it’s truly a mindset. One that values foresight over fire drills, context over crazy, and long-term partnership over short-term cost savings. If you’re serious about transformation, it starts with how you show up. Not just when things go wrong, but long before.

If this conversation got you thinking differently about the supply chain, that’s the point. Greg doesn’t just talk about transformation; he builds it. From high-stakes global logistics to precision-tuned value chains, his work at Nexus Supply Chain helps companies move faster, think smarter, and operate with the kind of resilience most orgs only talk about.

Want more? Watch the full Byte-Size episode with Greg Tormund HERE, and subscribe for more conversations that go beyond the buzzwords.

I really appreciate you being here. If you have feedback, DM me directly. I always love to hear from you.

See you next time!

—Kyler