Peter Drucker beat you to it - "the purest waste of time is making the unnecessary efficient."

Sorry, but I think your points regarding efficiency and risk in the global economy are poorly applied to your broader musings about modern supply chain management.

It may be true that a supply chain absolutely dependent on a single supplier has optimized a "bad" process, but the principle is age-old: lack of diversification. Similarly, your point regarding balancing of efficiency and risk is hardly a notion unique to modern supply chains. Seafaring merchants in centuries past had to balance how much cargo to load on a single vessel (efficiency) with the risk of that vessel sinking (risk). As always, those who manage risk better will compete better.

Secondly, it's a bit alarmist to predict that the future will hold more risk than the past; while climate change is upon us, and world events are unpredictable (as they've always been), hasn't modernity also enabled us with new technologies and processes that reduce risks past generations could not hedge against? Ultimately, a global supply chain is not inherently more risky than a purely domestic one (natural and political disasters can befall any part of the world), and NOT to seek cost efficiencies through a global network arguably entails more risk to an enterprise's financial well-being than any uncertainties in the global marketplace.

Having worked in the corporate world for 20 years, I can tell you that almost no thought goes into corporate strategy. Rather, what happens is that upper management become mesmerized by a particular constellation of buzzwords, and simple begin parroting them down the chain of command. No thought at all is given to the implications of these buzzwords, nor to what reality they really point to. There is no guidance as to what "implementing" a series of buzzwords would actually mean in terms of business strategy. You will just hear a CxO level person flourishing phrases like, "Do more with less!", "Lean and mean!", "Offshore and rightsize the organization!" It is perhaps difficult for people outside the corporate world to understand that this is actually how corporations make decisions, but it's true.

Once in a while I will make up a series of nonsense buzzwords, and repeat them to upper management when they ask me how my group is doing. My current favorite is, "I'm pre-proacting on an ongoing going forward basis, with a strong, team-oriented Vision component." Without exception, what I hear in reply is, "Great, keep it up!". I'm not kidding.

Andrew Leonard's points about the brittleness of globally stretched supply chains are well taken (particularly as the cost of energy, and hence transportation of goods from one far flung corner of the globe to another continues to rise.)

On the other hand, how much does it actually matter? It seems like, after any significant supply disruption, there's a great deal of screeching in the business papers about "$number of millions of dollars in lost business" due to the inability to obtain chips, cogs, or whatever. But unless we're talking about disruptions to basic necessities like food, heating, or medicines, it'd be just as easy to talk about the economic losses inherent in people not working more than 40 hours a week, or spending time reading Slate on line when they could be out contributing to the global economy.

Cell phone manufacturers work on lower margins than supermarkets. They are captives of the carriers that dictate retail price of the phones - often at below cost or zero price. Moreover they are hounded to provide ever new expensive features that in reality add little to no value and few people actually use. So any disruption in the logistics chain is bound to be serious. If cell phone builders wanted to protect themselves they'd work to slim down their product lines and make everything under the covers generic. We see a little bit of that in the 'unlocked' phones. Which if you don't know means that carriers intentionally cripple their own phones in order to upsell. Cell phone companies go along with this. But if cell phone companies extend this model to make more or less everything under the skin the same phone then it would go a long way to protecting their production and logistics model. The design costs are high but once they cross that the per unit manufacturing cost differential between the cheapest phone and the sexiest one is tiny. So what if that free phone you got is really an MP3 player and a TV - you didn't buy that service.

What is the most "efficient" bridge you can engineer ... one where the load limit matches exactly the load limit your planners expect it will need? or one where the load limit is designed to be 3 times the predicited maximum load?

Not a trivial question, as we as a society obsess over efficiency. When the step past efficiency is system collapse, then pinching pennies in the interests of "maximizing efficiency" may produce positive returns in the near future, and make a lot of people very wealthy. But we're in a time when any call for "overdesign" to minimize the chances of catastrophy is met with derision, both in business and government.

One way businesses plan for disaster is by buying insurance, and then the insurance companies promote or mandate safety measures to avoid having to pay. Maybe the problem is that there isn't enough insurance for this sort of thing?

Wo--do you know that you're not alone?

When I moved from Hollywood to Silicon Valley, I knew nothing about high tech. Everyone in my new office spoke in acronyms. One of my bosses, a director, who of course was less respected than anyone there (in high tech, people often wanted to remain in the lower echelon, because only there would they retain or acquire skills and knowledge), LOVED the buzzwords, but had absolutely no grasp of what he was doing.

I almost immediately responded to all the acronyms I didn't know by making up acronyms of my own. When scheduling a meeting, I'd say "(my boss) wants to discuss ERP, the new NOC and SOC, and the TVR," TVR being a meaningless acronyms, and the rest being real.

Can you imagine, in all the months during which I did that, only once did anyone _ever_ ask, "what does (made-up acronym) mean?" And, the punch line: that was the one acronym of my own creation that actually _meant_ something!

The reader narrowed the "to:" line to just me, and said, "uh--what does 'wb' mean?" I replied: "will be-and don't worry, I made up the acronym." He thought it was a new process or software!

Needless to say, I respected that man for piping up and asking, but I continue to marvel at all the people who heard nonsense acronyms and were too afraid to ask what they meant.