Retail marketers love complexity. The more variations of a product they can sell, the happier they are. How else can they command all that shelf real estate in big-box stores? How else can they promote innovation? And how else can they drive their supply-chain managers crazy?

Sustainability can involve a global effort to calculate carbon emissions across the entire supply chain. Or it can mean the changing of a few light bulbs.

Total Quality Management. Quality circles. Quality with a capital "Q." It all seems so...20th Century.

"Frankly, we thought we were a lot better than we were." Could those be the scariest words in business?

Despite gradual improvement since the summer of 2009 - the official end of the Great Recession - the U.S. unemployment rate remains unacceptably high. But don't tell that to companies in search of supply-chain talent.

Surveys are snapshots. They don't tell you what respondents were thinking a year earlier, or a day later. They offer up opinions that are frozen in time.

So the Chinese are gearing up to sell their branded merchandise in the U.S. But what about the other way around? Can American manufacturers capture a healthy share of China's burgeoning consumer market?

With every crisis comes opportunity. The Great Recession, which choked off access to capital and placed suppliers around the world in economic jeopardy, triggered the growth of supply-chain finance programs, benefiting suppliers and buyers alike.

Movie heists often involve sophisticated tools and brilliant plans that depend on crack timing in order to succeed. Not so in real life.

More than 30 years ago, when I began writing about transportation and logistics, one of the first pieces that I did was about the imminent demise of the U.S. merchant marine. Today, I find myself addressing the same issue. As industries go, this has got to be one of the slowest deaths on record.