Section E - anonymous's Profile

I agree with all of your solutions and believe that improving supply chain flexibility is one of the most important ones. Another angle to think about is creating a manufacturing ecosystem that is similar to the East Asian one you mentioned, but elsewhere and closer to areas of higher demand, such as in South America. This would allow for testing of new operating models such as the use of Foxbots, closer to where demand is, but without risking the survival of any plants in the US that are created partially to provide job opportunities for Americans.

I think the key here is exactly what you noted – the need for a longer time horizon on trade rules relating to the aircraft industry specifically. The Canadian government’s heavy subsidization of Bombardier is indicative of an inherent government interest in assisting the airline industry. One idea is to invest more in lobbying for longer time horizons in trade deals rather than in specific agendas that will only last for a short period of time. This way, should the trade deals turn out unfavorable, aircraft producers can plan for this by building relationships with and investing more in customers in other parts of the world.

I agree with your assessment of Tenet Health needing to focus more on how it can prepare for the types of diseases and healthcare issues arising from climate change in the long run. In addition to your point around improving its ability to handle large volume of patients arising from drastic climate events, I wonder if there is a way to predict the types of health issues that will be more common in general (e.g. insufficient amounts of certain types of vitamins in our body resulting from lack of food products that can supply these vitamins) and begin developing infrastructure / treatments to prepare for a bigger general shift in healthcare needs.

While I really like the solution you propose – an application for consumers to vote which designs they prefer – I wonder if this will be a hindrance to Inditex’s key advantage of speed. While getting the votes would help reduce inventory of unpopular items, it would slow down the speed with which runway items are available in stock at stores as it would need to go through an extra filter of consumer preferences. Moreover, I wonder whether this would make Inditex more vulnerable to competition, especially if all retailers start producing the same set of designs that the consumers prefer. We already see little differentiation in some of the mass designs produced by some retailers, and this differentiation may become even narrower with digitization.

It’s exciting to hear how much digitization has become a part of the thought process for improving education in many parts of the world. Thinking about my experience in a public school system abroad, however, I think that the biggest challenge is to get the hardware in place. As you noted, even though internet penetration may be low, this can be overcome with offline models. Without a hardware that will help access the content (whether online or offline), however, the struggle of educational coverage for such a large population still remains. In particular, as rural parts of India that need these resources most are also the ones that are most inaccessible (as we have learned through many cases covering rural India), hardware placement will be the key to this issue.

I am a proponent of your solution to team up with other players in the supply chain. It made me wonder if Whole Foods could play a part in startups like Indigo Agriculture by participating in the testing phase of their seeds and owning a stake in the increased output from those seeds. On the solution to diversify the sources of suppliers, I believe that this mitigates the risk of a drastic climate event having an impact on Whole Foods’ bottom line. However, it still wouldn’t address the issue of a broader decline in production that all suppliers would be facing in the long run, regardless of geography.

On the global perception of climate change: This may impact what Whole Foods does to lessen its contribution to climate change, but ultimately I do not think that it will impact how Whole Foods is handling its supply chain since this would be of core interest to Whole Foods regardless of public perception. It may, however, impact how leaders of Whole Foods think, and as a result, the aggressiveness with which they pursue strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on their supply chain.