Donald Frieson

This post is written in partnership with Reuters Events: Supply Chain. Reuters Events connects the world’s most senior supply chain leaders through conferences, research, and digital content. Learn more: events.reutersevents.com/supply-chain/usa   When decisions cannot keep pace with change There is a moment most planning leaders recognise right now: A tariff announcement lands. A carrier pulls capacity. Demand accelerates faster than the forecast adjusts. The decision window compresses, and by the time there is confidence in the data, the cost of delay is already building. These pressures across supply chains are not new. What has changed is the speed at which conditions move underneath a decision, often faster than organisations are set up to respond. Customer expectations do not flex when supply does not. The cost of a wrong call, whether inventory in the wrong market, capacity committed too early, or service levels slipping before anyone flags them, compounds quickly. Most organisations have responded by investing. Better tools. More data. AI pilots. Network reviews. The core problem persists: decisions are still being made without full confidence. Planning and execution do not align when conditions change. In many cases, the issue is not disruption itself. It is how long organisations take to…

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026   It started over drinks, 80s music, and a shared frustration that has probably launched more good organizations than any strategic planning process ever has. The Circular Supply Chain Coalition, or CSCC, came out of a realization that a lot of the right work was already happening, in reverse logistics, in remanufacturing, in local procurement, in community-based value chains, but nobody had connected it. The people doing the work were not in the same room. The companies with the materials were not talking to the processors who could recover them. The states with enabling policies were not linked to the investors looking for exactly those environments. So the coalition became, as its founders describe it, a collector of collectors. The focus right now is on three priority waste streams: batteries, semiconductors, and e-waste. These were not chosen randomly. They have two elements in common. They carry geopolitical consequence, meaning the supply chains behind them are controlled by other countries and that is a known vulnerability. And they have business cases that a CFO can actually evaluate. That second part matters more than people in the sustainability world usually admit. The hub…