Herb Shear

Last month, we launched Between the Lines, our Supply Chain Now book club, with a simple idea: the best leaders don’t just consume headlines, they read deeply, think critically, and stay curious. The response to our first edition reminded us how powerful shared learning can be! This month, we’re building on that momentum with fresh selections designed to challenge perspectives, spark new ideas, and strengthen the way we think, innovate, and navigate an ever-evolving global landscape.   Check out a few of the selections the Supply Chain Now team recommends from February 2026:   Scott Luton: The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis from Citrini Research Imagine a short-term future where the very technology we hail as humanity’s next great productivity engine becomes essentially the source of a global economic crisis. “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” from Citrini Research is a thought experiment that projects just such a scenario: by 2028, rapid and widespread AI adoption has supercharged productivity yet hollowed out the consumer economy, driving unemployment above 10% and triggering a deep market downturn as traditional spending collapses despite booming output. In this speculative, but unsettling, framework, AI doesn’t fail, it succeeds so overwhelmingly that the economy it was meant to…

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026   I spent today in a room full of people who think about waste for a living. And the word that kept coming up had nothing to do with recycling. It was sovereignty. Here is the situation. The United States imports 95% of its critical mineral supply. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, the stuff inside every battery, every semiconductor, every electric motor. We do not make it, we do not mine much of it, and we do not control the supply chain that delivers it. That is not an energy policy problem. That is a national security problem. Now here is the part that should make you put down your coffee. A ton of smartphones contains dramatically more gold than a ton of mined ore. We are talking about concentrations that make urban mining look like a gold rush compared to digging in the ground. And yet the recovery rate for those materials, once a phone leaves its first owner, drops to around 13%. We are losing roughly 80% of the value sitting in devices right now, in drawers, in closets, in landfills. E-waste is also the fastest growing waste stream…