Curriculum
Explore strategic frameworks and examine non-market global forces that have the greatest impact on your supply chain.
Change is inevitable. Making sure your supply chain is agile and adaptable is key to both optimizing your operations and capitalizing on opportunities created by technological and non-market disruption. Which is why the Supply Chain Management: Strategies and Innovations curriculum tackles both proven models for achieving supply chain excellence as well as what it takes to develop an innovative mindset for increased value creation.
Led by supply chain expert Hau Lee, creator of the Triple-A supply chain concept, along with research-based academic sessions, you will develop a more strategic, holistic, and proactive approach to your supply chain. The rigorous and relevant curriculum focuses on three key forces shaping your supply chain and teaches you how to leverage them for competitive advantage.
World-Class Supply Chain Management
From labor and logistics to infrastructure and sustainability, you’ll learn cutting-edge supply chain frameworks and fundamentals to create and manage a market-leading global supply chain that better meets customer needs. By focusing on customer demands, learn how to create a supply chain that enhances customer satisfaction, builds loyalty, and increases market share.
Geopolitics and Trade
Understand how your supply chain must respond to the needs of our ever-changing political and economic systems. Learn how to adapt to new global pressures — from regional trade pacts and tariffs to tax policies and global regulations — to effectively compete, succeed, and create value.
Technology and Innovation
Study how industries are being disrupted, learn what signals to monitor, and develop new perspectives and mindsets to make sure your organization is ready when disruption happens. When leveraged well, technological disruption can be a weapon your company uses to gain better insights from data, find new ways of reaching the customer, and, in some cases, to transform your business model. Learn to embed innovation into your supply chain to generate not just cost savings but value creation to edge out your competition.
Program Highlights
Leadership in Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management is key to your organization’s competitiveness. But how can you and other company leaders improve your organization’s ability to innovate and compete on the world stage, given what you know about your supply chain and the forces that impact it? During two sessions, you will review some of the fundamental ideas from the field of strategic management, and their implications for leadership.
The Triple-A Supply Chain: Agility, Adaptability, and Alignment
In a global market, companies are faced with diverse customers in geographically distributed markets with very different needs. The variables range from highly uncertain market conditions and changing tastes and technologies to the dependability of supply chain partners in delivering goods and services. Given such challenges, companies need to be agile and flexible to respond to market uncertainties, adapt to systemic changes in demand and supply patterns, and align the incentives of supply chain partners. This is what the AAA of Agility, Adaptability, and Alignment is about. Together, these capabilities form the basis upon which superior value can be created in your supply network.
Design Thinking
Stanford is one of the principal educational institutions driving the paradigm shift in the design field today. This session offers the chance to learn design thinking: a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to products, services, and business and organizational design. Participants will have a hands-on experience with the design thinking process and some practical discussion of its application to supply chain innovation and growth.
Beyond-Market Strategies
Most business school classes focus on firms’ interactions with customers, competitors, suppliers, and shareholders in the form of mutually beneficial voluntary exchange transacted in markets. In contrast, consider a firm’s strategic interactions with comparably important constituents, organizations, and institutions outside of markets. At Stanford GSB, beyond-market strategy is considered a central component of a company’s approach to achieving superior overall performance and must be integrated into its market strategy. Topics that we will discuss include activist pressures, political risk, regulation, and legislation, all of which substantially impact firms’ performance and profitability.