21st Century Business

Chapter 5. Digitizing Supply and Value Chains

	Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
	--Vincent Van Gogh

Beginning in the 1960s, a profound revolution began in the way management distributed work. What we began to see was a significant increase in the interplay of technology with work in general and with the actions and decisions of managers. Because this interplay increased so sharply—thanks to the rapid deployment of computers—we can speak of a revolution taking place. This revolution, like its political variant, started with quiet root causes without a great deal of noise or people shouting in the streets. As with so many other profound changes that came in the second half of the twentieth ...