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.

The nation's transportation infrastructure is in dire shape.

To be a corporate I.T. professional today, you have to be obsessed with cybersecurity. A line on your resume should read "paranoid tendencies." Because somebody really is out to get you - or, at least, your company's proprietary information.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the continuing efforts of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to reduce, if not eliminate, the use of independent owner-operators in port drayage operations. But that's just one of several major issues affecting truckers today. Here are some more:

"New business reality." That's an apt way to describe the position of any company that has just emerged from four years of reorganization under Chapter 11 of U.S. bankruptcy law. And it's precisely the challenge that Delphi Automotive faced back in 2009, when it sought to reinvent itself and shore up relations with an army of suppliers.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month drove two more nails into the coffin of port efforts to impose local rules on drayage operators, in violation of interstate commerce law. The court ruled unanimously that the Port of Los Angeles could not require drayage companies to display placards on their trucks that included a phone number for reporting concerns about their operations. It also could not mandate the development of off-street parking plans for harbor vehicles.

Hamish Brewer, chief executive officer of JDA Software, was giving a speech at the Economic Club of Phoenix last year, when the topic of global inventory levels came up. The question he posed: How much stuff is currently in transit or socked away in warehouses the world over? The answer: Nobody really knows.

It's been more than three years since the Obama Administration launched its National Export Initiative (NEI), with much ballyhoo. The stated goal of the massive effort was to double U.S. exports within five years - from $1.57tr in 2009 to a projected $3.14tn in 2015.