Why Supply Chain Leadership Has to Change — and What That Actually Looks Like

The Conversations That Matter Most

Pete Behrens has spent years working with senior supply chain leaders at some of the world's largest industrial organizations. The conversations he has with those leaders rarely start where you'd expect.

They don't start with technology platforms, network design, or digital transformation roadmaps. They start with people — specifically, whether the leaders running these organizations are equipped to handle a world where the variables never stop changing.

Built for a Different World

His answer, more often than not, is that they aren't. Not because supply chain leaders lack intelligence or experience, but because most were developed for a different kind of challenge: operational mastery in conditions stable enough to plan for. Those conditions are increasingly rare.

The Leadership Gap Disruption Keeps Exposing

Pete's work with global supply chain organizations is built around a simple premise: the leadership gap that disruption keeps exposing isn't a technology problem. It's a human one. And closing it requires developing a genuinely different kind of leader — one who builds team capability rather than directing it, distributes decision-making rather than centralizing it, and sustains momentum when clarity isn't available.

Now in Industry Week

He calls this catalyst leadership. And in a piece just published in Industry Week, he makes the case for what it looks like in practice — the specific shifts that define it, the mistakes organizations most commonly make when trying to develop it, and where to start.

Pete works with supply chain leadership teams at global industrial organizations on building the leadership culture needed to navigate complexity, sustain performance, and develop the people behind it. If that's a conversation worth having, get in touch.