Collaborate, build, empower
There is no limit to what manufacturers and distributors can accomplish when they join together, share resources, and offer innovations that can inspire and transform communities.
Today's edition is inspired by my conversation with Karthik Chidambaram, the Founder and CEO of DCKAP, a firm dedicated to facilitating seamless communication between systems. During our chat, I discovered that Karthik views DCKAP as a company and a thriving community—an ideal frame for our LinkedIn Live event. We discussed how community may serve as a transformative tool for supply chain innovation and explored actionable strategies, the role of content, and ways to overcome barriers and generate profits. Additionally, we introduced new strategic metrics for driving progress. Above all, we aimed to emphasize the importance of collaboration and spark a meaningful dialogue. Below, you'll find a link to our conversation. Please listen and add your comments. If you want more, I encourage you to attend a real-world meeting hosted by Karthik at the end of this month; details here and below!
The supply chain as a community
What's in a name? Lots. My LinkedIn Live event with Karthik Chidambaram is titled How Manufacturers and Distributors Can Build Communities. Let me unpack that. By building communities, we don't mean platforming customers to interact with suppliers, giving them a voice to share experiences and offer opinions in a self-serving effort to market products or services. If that's what you want to do, read When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage, a seminal Harvard Business Review article, here.
That's not us. Our conception of community is a radical shift to serving, not selling. It is a call for manufacturers and distributors to come together, share resources, and offer innovations to empower communities—the cities and towns where we all live and work. Serving communities is a path to new revenue streams and breakthrough business models. And just as form follows function in architecture, so do profits follow value. By serving communities, manufacturers and distributors can help society solve its most complex problems, monetize investments, and build a supply chain worthy of our times.
Best of all, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-In-Time Transform Business, Society, and Daily Life, by Robert Wolcott and Kaihan Krippendorff, is a North Star for leveraging technology for the betterment of communities. Pico Velásquez, a computational architect, metaverse thought leader, and CEO of VIIRA, sees the opportunity and describes Proximity as:
A radical, true-to-the-future vision—and it's already happening all around us. As someone deeply entrenched in data-driven design and the utilization of cutting-edge technologies like AI, virtual reality, blockchain, and sensors for creating smarter cities and experiences, I find Wolcott and Krippendorff's Proximity essential.
There's much more in our conversation. Karthik and I each share our passions and how we are pursuing them. We explore the power of communities and generate new ideas. I will write about communities in my editions going forward, but for now, I encourage you to listen and watch my conversation with Karthik here:
LinkedIn Live Conversation: Karthik Chidambaram and Mark Dancer
About the artwork
By design, Empowering Communities, Transforming Supply is an abstract work. Is it art? I'm not sure. But it is worth considering as we think about our attempt to encourage a radical shift toward serving communities. Here's the narrative, suggested by ChatGPT, to create the art on Leonardo.AI:
Imagine an image in an Abstract Expressionist style, with no text, that embodies a radical shift: manufacturers and distributors within the supply chain coming together, not as competitors but as collaborators, sharing resources and driving innovations that empower the communities where we all live and work. The image should capture the essence of how prioritizing communities' needs and aspirations helps solve society's most pressing challenges. The visual should evoke a sense of connection, innovation, and purpose, symbolizing the harmony between business and community service.
Does this narrative match my discussion with Karthik? If not, how would you change it? Can you create your art and share it?
A way forward
In anthropology, communities are known as the coming together of humans to solve problems and build the lives they want to live. By serving communities and helping them thrive, manufacturers and distributors are acting in a very human way. It's natural, but more work is needed to see a way forward.
Karthik is on the right path. I encourage you to attend DCKAP's Round-Up 2024 on Tuesday, August 27, in Chicago's fantastic Adler Planetarium. There, Tom Gale, CEO of Modern Distribution Management (MDM), will share insights from his many years of covering distribution, all the more relevant since MDM was recently acquired by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW.)
I would love to hear from you. Please share your comments below or reach out at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.