In negotiating, you can be self-defeatingly muscular or benign, says Kate Vitasek, on the faculty of the Center for Executive Education at the University of Tennessee. Or you can be credible. That's a lesson supply chain managers can learn from Professor Oliver Williamson.

The truck driver shortages of 1983 and 2004 could be dwarfed by what's coming by 2012, in the view of Tom Nightingale, chief marketing officer at Con-way. New hours-of-service rules and CSA 2010 are doing nothing to help that situation. Still, there are ways to prepare for the crunch.

As new government regulations intensify the transportation capacity crunch, non-asset-based brokers will be even more hard pressed to find equipment for their customers, says Mike Williams, chief operating officer at Sunteck Transport Group. That could weed out fly-by-night operators that sometimes give the industry a bad rep.

Getting containers out of China timely and at a fair price is the single-biggest concern of shippers, says Tim Sensenig, executive vice president of Four Soft. But inadequate visibility, government regulations and determining what technology investments to make are very much on the minds of these executives as well.

John Brockwell, practice leader in trade management consulting with J.P. Morgan, talks about how companies are shifting from a mindset based purely on cost, to one that the accounts for the variability of global supply chains.