Merging Professional & Personal Lives - Part 1

Happy Holidays Friends!!

The world we live in now is more intertwined than it has ever been. Even at our individual level, the lines between personal life & professional life are blurring faster than we can cope with.

We all make & receive personal calls and check our e-mail during work hours. Similarly, many of us work longer than 40 hours each week, many times even on weekends or even while on vacation. If we truly subtract all non-work related activities from the hours that we are in the office, I honestly do not know what % of us "really work" even 40 hrs/week. One can make a valid case that talking about yesterday's game at the water fountain or about the last episode of "American Idol" or "Law & Order" or "CSI" in the break room is part of developing working relationships with our colleagues. But that is a separate issue and not the focus of this posting.

What I want to talk about is that "as much as we want to (at least keep trying to) compartmentalize our professional and personal lives, there is a valid case for the need to merge these two in a different sense and for a different reason". See if you agree with me.

How many of us actually use (to the fullest) the best practices and experiences from our personal lives in our professional lives and vice-versa? As an example, how many accountants who balance the company income and expenses down to the penny can claim to do the same when it comes to our personal income & expenses at home? How many of us who manage several people at work can claim to doing an equally good or better job at managing our personal relationships (or vice-versa)?

Coming to our specific profession of "Supply Chain Management", how many of us do a great job of "managing the Supply chain" in our personal life? As you keep reading, you may realize that life is nothing but "Supply Chain Management" and that all the principles and best practices in Supply Chain Management can and should be applied to our personal lives as well.

Think of our needs, wants, desires, dreams are "Demand" and our objective of bringing them to reality as "Supply".

Now, here are the rest of the pieces of the supply chain: "Corporate Supply Chain Networks" consist of vendors / contract manufacturers, corporate plants, DCs, corporate customers, etc. "Personal Supply Chain Networks" consist of family / friends, colleagues, subordinates, bosses, associations (that we are part of), our other formal & informal networks etc.

"Corporate Resources" that help with Supply Chain Management consist of machinery, work hours and people (our own as well as those of vendors and contract manufacturers). In personal life, these resources are our own time at work, skill set, interpersonal skills, experience, education, others we help or take assistance from, etc.

You get the idea. Now, you can apply these same concepts to other aspects of "Supply Chain management" - Forecasting, Demand - Supply Matching,Detailed Planning & Scheduling, Collaboration, Alerts & Event Management, Constrained Planning, Supplier Relationship Management, Customer Relationship Management, Network Design & Rationalization, Inventory & Warehouse Management, Cost Minimization, Profit Maximization, etc. and find out their "equivalents" in your personal lives.

So then, how do we apply the basic principles and best practices of Supply Chain Management to our personal lives? That will be the topic for the next posting. We can also later explore the reverse, namely, how can we apply the basic principles and best practices of day-to-day life to Supply Chain Management.

In the mean time, I would like to get your comments on the above similarities and your suggestions for how to apply the basic principles and best practices of Supply Chain Management to our personal lives.

I would like to invite you to even write "guest articles" on this blog. There are experts out there who can explain (better than I can) if and how any crisis around the world (e.g. the current global financial crisis) is the result of failure to manage the supply chain (global financial supply chain, in this particular example) and how some of the basic principles and best practices of supply chain management have not been implemented efficiently in the past and the way forward to applying and evolving the basic principles and best practices of supply chain management to these problems.

I am sure, whether it is global issues, such as, energy crisis or global warming or personal issues, as in relationship management or a mortgage crisis, the basic principles and best practices of supply chain management can be valid for each of these.

Thanks for your time.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst in 2009!!