The Supply Chain in Crisis

Supply chains have proven to be extremely powerful systems for generating responsiveness and efficiency in serving customers and consumers, while they promised to balance interregional inequalityinequality and foster human developmenthuman development around the globe. Despite selective successes of supply chains as economic powerhouses of wealth generationwealth generation and consumer satisfaction,consumer satisfaction long-term collateral damage turned out to be devastating. This led to the supply chain being increasingly regarded as a broken systembroken system, a mechanism of value destruction rather than value creation. We show how global supply chains are intertwined in many ways with environmental, social and political systems. Thus, the crisis of the supply chain may cause crises in these systems, and simultaneously be driven by environmental, social and political crises. For leaving the ongoing state of crisesstate of crises, we discuss the power of systemic and holistic thinking as well as transformativetransformative public policypublic policytransformative public policy.