In 2020, when the world’s supply chains seized up all at once, a lot of CEOs and CFOs, across industries, told analysts and reporters that supply chain would no longer sit in the back office. It would be part of the regular job now — a standing priority, not a crisis response.
I remember hearing it and thinking: good. Thirty years keeping supply chains running, that felt like validation. The people at the top were finally going to pay attention the way the people doing the work always had to.
I also thought “hmmm, let’s see.”
The data on follow-through isn’t kind. McKinsey’s 2024 global supply chain survey found that organizations had started pulling back on the very investments meant to build resilience.[i]
And less than one year later, one of the authors tracking the shift put it plainly: the chief supply chain officer has “lost the seat at the table,” as companies swing back toward cost-cutting and inventory reduction.[ii]
Four years, 2020 to 2024. That’s roughly how long it took for a pandemic-era promise to fully unwind.
None of this should be surprising, and that’s the part worth sitting with. Supply chain got boardroom attention in 2020 and 2021 for the same reason a house fire gets your full attention: because it’s burning down in front of you.
Attention like that is easy to sustain while the smoke is still in the room. It’s much harder to sustain once the fire’s out and the insurance check has cleared.
The mistake wasn’t the pledge. The mistake was believing crisis-level urgency could survive past the crisis. Once shipping lanes cleared and shelves filled back up, the org chart did what org charts do, and reallocated attention toward whatever was burning next.
Here’s what I believe: supply chain management is not a project with an end date.
It’s a daily discipline. The unglamorous, ongoing work of keeping supplier relationships healthy, capacity secured, and risk visible, whether or not anything is currently on fire. It is regular, face to face visits. It is sharing your company’s marketing and sales plans with your suppliers, and showing them how their capabilities are critical to your success.
That kind of work doesn’t make for a good earnings-call soundbite. It also doesn’t stop mattering just because nobody’s watching anymore.
I spent three decades on the inside of that work, at companies making everything from consumer electronics to lithium-ion batteries. The supply chain problems that actually hurt a company are almost never the dramatic ones.
They’re the slow ones. A supplier relationship that quietly erodes. A capacity commitment nobody renegotiated. A single point of failure everyone meant to fix after Q2.
None of that announces itself. It just accumulates — until one day it looks exactly like the crisis everyone swore they’d never be caught in again.
The 2020 pledge was sincere. It just came with an expiration date nobody wrote down: the day the crisis ended. You can’t fix an ongoing discipline with a one-time commitment made under duress, because the intention fades the same way the duress does.
The last few years proved it: supply chain attention rises and falls with the news cycle, not with the actual risk sitting underneath it.
Coming next: the promise didn’t break in a boardroom. It broke in a phone call nobody made.
[i] “Supply chains: Still vulnerable,” McKinsey & Company, Operations Practice, published October 14, 2024.
URL: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/supply-chain-risk-survey-2024
[ii] “Supply chain wanes in 2025, but resilience remains key trend,” TechTarget/SearchERP, published December 5, 2024.
URL: https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/feature/Digital-tech-tops-supply-chain-trends-list-for-2024