The other side of dreaming big is that the world is just not ready for your ideas. And I am not saying that in a vain sort of Einsteinian or Newtonian kind of way but it’s a fact. Imagine if the smartphone had been invented in the 1970s, it would have been of no use to us since the data technologies required to support the smartphone did not exist back then. The smartphone on its own would have therefore been rendered as an utterly useless gadget.

In my own little world, I too dream of a futuristic process that delivers products from the manufacturing site to end customers in the blink of an eye. In the big bad world of supply chain, however, things can get pretty complicated – it’s like a web woven by a gigantic spider with every strand connected to the other. If you pull one, the entire web is disturbed. So, if you aspire to make radical changes in one strand, you cannot do so without getting support from the entire web. And if the web is not strong enough to provide that support, your one strong strand will skew the system and pull it down. The idea therefore is to strengthen each strand little by little till the entire web becomes a robust network that can withstand any shock. This is where collaboration across functions and the complete weeding out of siloed ways of working becomes extremely important.

This thought resonates with a quote from one Chief Seattle that I read in a museum during a trip to the Sundarbans in West Bengal back in 2016. He says: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect”.