Breakthrough Supply Chains: How Companies and Nations Can Thrive and Prosper in an Uncertain World

CHAPTER 7

Risk, Assurance, and Resilience

Allowance must be made for the intervention of the unexpected.

—Winston Churchill¹

Supply chains have been at the nexus of globalization, exploiting the cross-border flows of goods, capital, and information. It is imperative that supply chain executives today be aware of geopolitical and macroeconomic issues—they must know the world they are sourcing from, selling into, and redesigning supply chains from end to end. Knowing about purely functional areas such as inventory management and logistics is no longer enough. Since the 1990s, and especially after the inclusion of China in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, many companies expanded their operations on an international basis. They globalized ...