Live Podcast: Wisdom from the Supply Chain OG

Details #

This live episode of the Logistics Leadership Podcast features special guest Dale Rogers, ON Semiconductor Professor of Business at Arizona State University, who has decades of academic and industry experience. In conversation with Karl Siebrecht and Ben Dean at the Logistics Leadership Forum, Dale shares stories from his career, reflects on the transformation of the supply chain field, and explores emerging challenges and innovations—from AI to talent development. The discussion offers deep insight into how the field has grown in scope, complexity, and strategic importance.

Key topics discussed:

• The broad and evolving nature of supply chain as a discipline that spans finance, marketing, operations, and technology.
• The impact of artificial intelligence, automation, and semiconductor advancements on global logistics systems.
• The changing landscape of talent in supply chain including shifts in education, international student enrollment, and the need for technical and communication skills.
• The challenges of supply chain education and perception among younger generations, and efforts to increase visibility of the field in early education.

Recorded live at the Logistics Leadership Forum, April 24, 2025 (Scottsdale, AZ).

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Episode Transcript #

Ben: Hey folks. Welcome back to the Logistics Leadership Podcast. I'm Ben Dean, as always with you here, and we've got a very special episode in store today because today we're going to let you in on our first ever live recorded episode. And this was recorded live at the Logistics Leadership Forum. That name may sound familiar because that forum was the impetus for this podcast. We got so many great conversations holding the event a couple of years back that Karl said we need to keep this conversation going, and the podcast was a great forum for us to do so. So we're coming full circle on this episode, bringing it back to the Forum. And even more lucky to get Dr. Dale Rogers as our interviewee today. That name may be familiar to you because Dale is a legend in the supply chain space since before supply chain was a term. He'll tell you more about that. Dr. Rogers is at Arizona State's School of Business. He's been a huge part of CSCMP. He's very involved in industry, not just academia as we'll hear more about, but enough from me. Let's get to Dale in the interview at the Logistics Leadership Forum.

Narrator: It's the Logistics Leadership Podcast with Karl Siebrecht and Ben Dean.

Karl: Welcome everyone to the Logistics Leadership Podcast. My name is Karl Siebrecht, I'm your host as always, but what's not happening as always is we're actually doing this one live. We are right now in a massive stadium full of people. You can hear 'em in the background if you listen carefully. That's pretty good. Yeah. So we're doing it differently this time and excited about that as well. Our guest today is an old friend of mine, an esteemed Professor of Supply Chain Management and one of the OGs of the supply chain sector. He has been a professor, I think at three different universities. He got a degree in supply chain from one of the very first programs that offered a Master's. I'm looking at him to make sure I'm getting this right, in supply chain. He was the very first advisor of our company here, Flexe. And along the way has also done consulting with a lot of big corporations as well as non-profits. So, Dale, welcome and thank you for being with us. It's great to have you. 

Dale: It's really nice to be here. 

Karl: Yeah. Kind of cool, right? Yes. Yeah. You know, got a mic. We got people here, so we'll try not to mess this up. And I think if you wouldn't mind, we'll start the way we typically do. Could you just give us a sense of your background, Dale? And then also tell us how it came to pass that you decided to get into a career of supply chain. 

Dale: Well, I grew up in Michigan, Lansing, Michigan, which is right next to East Lansing. And the local college was good in supply chain. I did my undergraduate in math and English cause I thought, well, I'm gonna be like the ancient Greeks and study language and math, which is what they, which is a weird thing for an 18-year-old kid to think actually. But, that's what I thought. And then I was a math teacher. I thought, geez, I need to make some money here. So I went back to get my MBA and they said Michigan State is the best in the world in materials and logistics management, which is what supply chain was called back in 1980 and I did that and I took a class from a guy who sort of invented supply chain as an academic discipline, Don Bowersox. And he yelled at me a lot in the class and then I ended up being a PhD student of his. I had moved to Florida and he brought me home from Florida, worked for his software company, which was doing AI back in the eighties.

Is that a thing? AI in the eighties? It wasn't that good, honestly. Okay. That's why I'm a professor. As it was, the company didn't go that well. We sold it to Kearney for like cents on the dollar. I don't know what they did with it, but, yeah, AI in the eighties was basically neural networks and expert systems. Now, neural networks are still around, but I remember trying to build an expert system for Dow Corning, the fiberglass people. Yeah. And thinking this is nonsense. No one should ever do this. Cause the minute you did it, it was out of date. So I was skeptical about AI, but you could see promise with the neural network side. And then obviously today it's a big thing. 

Karl: Got it. So you got into supply chain because that's what the school down the street taught. Yeah. And they were great at it.

Dale: I wanted to do finance, but they said, well if you're gonna, if you're gonna do finance, you should go to Duke.

Karl: Oh, see, you snuck that in. I was gonna say, so Michigan State is world renowned for supply chain. They're okay at basketball.

Dale: And I didn't wanna go to Duke. Yeah, I know, I know Karl and I have this thing about Duke and Michigan State and usually he wins. It's like, well, always he wins. 

Karl: Actually it’s a bit heartbreaking this year, but, Dale, thank you for that. I'm gonna be asking you the easy questions today and then my colleague Ben Dean, who joins me on each one of these episodes, and I neglected to introduce him earlier, he's gonna ask you the tough questions. So I'm gonna toss the next one over to Ben. 

Ben: Yeah. Interestingly, we all fell into supply chain somehow. What's kept you there? What about this has been so interesting over your career.? 

Dale: You know, you know what's cool about supply chain? Some people think it's like a narrow niche, but really of all the sort of business discipline, it's the most broad. It touches on finance. I mean, the class I teach the last couple years is supply chain financing and it touches on finance and it's accounting and it's operations. And the part of supply chain that I come from is part of marketing, you know, where part of marketing is the generation of demand, but the other half of marketing is satisfaction of demand, and that's really logistics and supply chain management. So it's incredibly broad. It changes every day. I mean, gosh, just think of what's happened in the last 10 years since, I guess it's 11 years since I came up to Seattle, next month actually, to visit you was May of 2014. And look at how much has changed and, and we're obviously in a time of incredible change. So it's interesting and I don't think you're ever gonna run outta jobs in supply chain.

Ben: Good news for this audience. 

Dale: Yeah. 

Ben: So it's not just academia. You're not in an ivory tower speaking Latin to students all day. 

Dale: I don't know, my Latin isn't that good actually. 

Ben: You've had a lot of, you know, commercial side. 

Dale: I have learned de minimus a lot lately actually. 

Ben: Yeah. That’s Latin.

Dale: Of the minimum. Yeah. 

Ben: But what would you highlight from helping out actual business enterprise through your academic work? 

Dale: Well, I was thinking when Will was talking and I think I must have met Will at that dinner that we had when Prologis, I think back a long time ago. 

Ben: For the audience, Will O'Donnell of Prologis, he's on an earlier episode. 

Dale: Yeah. And I was thinking about how AI is transforming most everything we do right now. And I thought, you know, I wonder if everybody understands what AI really is. Cause it's a broad term, but what it, what it really means, it's basically probability and statistical methods. Most of them old. One of 'em that we use in AI is Bayesian Statistics. That was, you know, invented by Pastor Bayes who used to go for long walks. He was a Scottish Pastor in Scotland, Presbyterian minister, I used to go for long walks with Adam Smith and you know, the Adam Smith. There's a lot of Smiths, but this was the Adam Smith and so he invented this, this statistical methodology that, you know, we're using now as one of the AI sort of machine learning methods. And so we're, we're seeing with technology available and we're seeing incredible advances in things like AI and it's really transforming what we're doing in supply chain.

Ben: Absolutely. 

Karl: So, we've already established that you've had a long career in supply chain. I'd love to know, as you sit, from where you sit today, what surprises you about how supply chains work today that you wouldn't have predicted, say, 20 years ago? Does anything surprise you or has it kind of been more of a, hey, the fundamental problems are the same, the, you know, innovation happens and solves problems better, but fundamentally not surprised? Or is there just anything that jumps out? 

Dale: There are some, there are some big surprises to me. One is we have to, generationally we have to keep relearning lessons that it seems like we, we would've, that we already knew. Like, for instance, the tariff thing that everybody's talking about, you know, we have 150 years of economic theory that shows that overall, society is way better if you are doing free trade. Now, tariffs can benefit one group for a little while, but over the long run they're always bad. And it seems like we would've, I mean, we've learned that the hard way more than once. So there's lots of things like that where we kind of have to keep relearning those things. And, and that's surprising to me. I keep thinking, okay, we're gonna figure out the answer and then we're gonna remember that answer. And, and it doesn't seem like we always do. That's probably my biggest surprise. And that can be sort of the rantings of an old guy who was thinking, geez, I can't believe how dumb, you know, but that's probably the hardest thing for me to think about, that it seems like we would already known that. There has been some incredible advancements though that you could not possibly have seen coming. You know, when I was a math teacher at Hill High School in Lansing, Michigan, I was doing this thing at Michigan State, and they gave me a 4K Radio Shack computer for my room cause I was teaching out at Michigan State, students to get into the STEM programs. We didn't call it STEM back then. 4K. So that's not even a whole sentence now. And you know, if you think about, everybody in here has at least one phone, and the guys who have terrible jobs have to have two phones, I think. That's always one of those things. You don't want to be the guy with two phones, I think, but, you know, you've got more power in your pocket than was a desktop computer in 1995 or was what took people to the moon in 1969. And it's just incredible how things keep building on top of each other and give you the ability to solve problems at a speed, which is really phenomenal.

Karl: Yeah, it's like the manifestation of Moore's Law, right? Yeah. So, wait, was Moore, do you have the backstory on Moore? 

Dale: Yeah. Gordon Moore. He was one of the Fairchild eight. Fairchild Semiconductor. My endowed professorship is, I'm the ON Semiconductor Professor of Business. Fairchild Semiconductor is now part of ON, it got acquired by ON, but it wasn't as good as it was before the Fairchild eight, who didn't like the guy they were working for, left Fairchild and said, we ought to do our own thing and start a company called Intel. Which announced today, they're gonna lay off 20% of their staff. So, you know, things aren't good there either, but yeah. 

Ben: And you focus a lot in semiconductor and chips. It's an interesting intersection now that AI is helping logistics, but also driving the supply chain. 

Dale: Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because, I mean, geez, Arizona is sort of ground zero now for the semiconductor industry. You know, Intel has a huge, most of their employees are here, ON, which is part of the old Motorolas here, and then TSMC put in 65 billion, just not too far from here, and they're putting in another hundred billion dollars and we can't have the lives we lead without semiconductors and maybe we can't even have lives because all weapons these days that work well are smart weapons. You know, if you think about Russia versus the Ukraine and Russia is slowly grinding down Ukraine, but look at how this little country were able to hold off. You know, Russia is a country with 11 time zones. If you look through history, you know, Napoleon, Hitler, it didn't work that well when you attack Russia, right? I mean, it just never did. And, and so 11 time zones, it is this huge, very difficult country to fight. And Ukraine has been holding them off for three years, mostly because the smart weapons they have are better than what Russia has. Now that won't work forever and ever and ever, but you really need semiconductors just for defense purposes, besides everything else we do. I mean, who would've thought there'd be semiconductors in a washing machine? And I really don't know how to work our washing machine that well. I sometimes get reprimanded by Zach's mother about my washing machine style, but there's all these buttons and it will adapt to the buttons you push, even if you push the wrong ones, I always tell her. But the semiconductor somehow adapts and sometimes it says it's gonna be 40 minutes and then it's 20. I don't, you know, who would've thought you needed a brain and a washing machine?

Ben: I don't know why it needs that long song at the end. The good beep. 

Dale: Yeah, I get tired of that too. Yeah. I really hate the dryer one though, which also has semiconductors in it. 

Ben: So yeah. Semiconductors driving AI, driving democratization of warfare. Do you see that democratizing supply chains, is it easier to lower barrier into entry to have a successful, resilient supply chain? 

Dale: Well, it hugely lowers the barrier of entry. Think about you used to have to have a lot of capital to build a business and, and what we've done in the U.S. now, it feels to me at this moment in time, we're trying to tear that down a little bit, but you can have virtual companies where maybe it's just a few people in an office and you're managing operations through smart systems, and you're making stuff happen all over the world. We've really literally over the last 50 years, moved countries closer together. Think about when the first really international business was happening during World War II and after World War II when, like, say the Coca-Cola company expanded around the world. That was really hard. Today it's much easier, and some of you guys know, I think, Karl, you know for sure, if you look at how venture capital funds, startups today, they allocate way less money, they can use their regular resources to go across more companies because the systems piece of those venture capital spends are so, percentage wise, are so much lower than they used to have to be. What you could fund one startup with in 2005, you can, you can fund now seven because of the reduced cost, because you don't need as much capital. The other thing that we've built in the U.S. is we'll forgive you if you fail in business. And, you know, some countries, if you fail once, you can never get a bank loan ever again. But we allow for new entrants to come into the market all the time. And it's a really amazing time in the history of the world and hopefully we're not undoing it actually. 

Karl: Yeah. So a hot topic, supply chain, not just today, but kind of everywhere is talent, talent in the supply chain sector because in large part, technology is evolving so quickly. Technology is such a critical element of, you know, delivering the solution that your customer needs. You need people that have technical skills, data analytics skills. You need people with change management skills. We heard about that. You need people that can communicate really, really well. So a lot of skills that weren't necessarily as critical in supply chain talent in the past. Okay, so let's talk about talent. And what I think is particularly interesting is you've been teaching students for decades, so I'd love to understand how that has evolved over the years. Do you feel like the makeup of the people who are now interested in supply chain has changed? Have you seen any changes in the demand for this area of study? Just love to hear your perspective. How has this changed? 

Dale: Yeah, it is interesting because if you go back to, say 1980, when I really kinda got involved in this, you know, your typical traffic manager was an older guy with a cigar that yelled at all the people bringing trucks into the terminal. And obviously it's much more sophisticated now. One of the issues we've had… 

Karl: That guy, was he in your class by the way? 

Dale: He wasn't actually, no. No, he wasn't. And, he didn't come back. Now today, access to education and continuing education is easier than ever. All of us that teach supply chain have different master's degrees. We have different undergraduate degrees. We have certificates, you know, over the last five years I've trained 500 people working mostly in Africa, but across the whole world in a special certificate program designed to help people do the supply chain for healthcare. And you know, it'll be funny, I'll be in an airport or someplace in the world and someone says, Dr. Rogers, I was one of your students and I think, I never saw you before. But we can do it, you know, online. And so, people can, you know, it can be the middle of the night in Phoenix and people are watching my class wherever. And so the access to education is better than it has ever been. The research I think that is coming out of some universities now to, truthfully, one of my, my pet peeves, I talked to young faculty, including the younger Dr. Rogers, quite a bit about, you know, we need to be doing something that's relevant to practice. It's not okay to just do stuff to fill up journals that isn't very relevant. We need to be doing something that actually makes an impact. And so if you think about, just think about an iPhone, for example. Everything in an iPhone, all of those components came out of university research. Now, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and whoever follows them, were able to orchestrate that stuff together and put it, you know, integrate it and put it into a cell phone. Everything that Elon Musk did with the Tesla comes out of university research. And so universities and the education we're doing has, you know, obviously I'm not objective about this, as you might imagine, but has really changed the world. It's really a huge part of why the U.S. is successful. You know, this year I had 80 students across two classes, and then I had an online class, that was my teaching load for the year was three courses. So 80 students. I had the most Americans, I mean usually speak to my class, but this year I didn't do that class that usually speak to, but I had the most Americans I've had in the last five years. And it was seven out of 80. Seven out of 80. Seven out of 80. 

Karl: So, that was gonna be my next question. So you talked about kind of the supply of institutions to teach and to do research. And then there's the demand. Like, is there demand from students? 

Dale: There is. 

Karl: I think you've already answered my question. Is that representative? Seven out of 80? 

Dale: Yeah. Well, if it’s a technical field, like if you walk through the computer science school at  ASU or, and we're the biggest engineering school, we're the biggest university in the United States, you will not see that many native born Americans. We tend to see more Americans in some of the softer disciplines. Like if you have a degree in fashion management or stuff, you're gonna get mostly all Americans. That's not good. But we've been able to keep that technological pipeline up through bringing in smart people from outside the U.S. and getting a first class education in the United States, and then they end up staying here and within a generation, their family is American. So it is something that we're concerned about and we'd like to see, and we're trying to do all these different kinds of things, and not just my university, but every university, to make it easier for Americans, for working professionals, to engage with the university cause it is a problem. You go into any very technical college in most any really good university and you're not going to see as many Americans as you would've when I was in school, or even 20 years ago. 

Ben: Do you think that's something that we need to bring supply chain education even younger, middle school, high school? I'd never experienced anything like that at those ages.

Dale: Yeah. I think some universities are trying to do that. I know the younger Dr. Rogers goes and visits high schools in Colorado, and I think we have some people at ASU. 

Karl: Do they play the beer, do you guys play the beer game when you go? Oh, the Pepsi game. 

Dale: Yeah. Cause you can't say beer in a high school, right? Yeah. Even though they may know what beer is, I think. But yeah.

Ben: I mean, the proliferation of availability in secondary and higher education has been huge. So, to Karl's question, is there a demand signal? Why do these institutions recognize the value of supply chain degrees more than they did?

Dale: You know, I think when you're a kid, you know what a doctor is. You know what a lawyer is. You know what a guy that sells cars is. You don't really know what everybody in this room does, and it's kind of a complicated story, isn't it? It's a little bit complex and I, you know, I remember being on planes like in the nineties and I'd be reading something and the person sitting, I remember this one lady sitting next to me said, oh, what are you doing? That looks like a hard thing to read. And I said, oh, I'm a professor. And she goes, oh, what do you teach? And I said, I teach logistics. And she said, I have always loved philosophy. I guess that's sort of philosophy, I guess. 

Ben: We love logistics commercials from UPS about 10 years ago. Like, the marketing of logistics. It came up earlier on the season. Is logistics cool now? 

Dale: I don't know. I don't know. 

Karl: I think it's a stretch. 

Dale: It depends. One of the things is when you're recruiting young people, what picture do you show them on the slide? You know, like on the quiz that we were just doing a minute ago, there was a lady standing in a warehouse or a factory. We've noticed that doesn't really help students want to come study that. 

Ben: Should I ask that’s about the lady or the warehouse or what?

Dale: I think the warehouse. Yeah, so people don't understand that supply chain is the intersection of a business and not just one business, but multiple businesses. I mean, if you think about the people in here and the careers folks have had and the international travel, and I mean, it's really an amazing thing, but you just, it's hard to visualize it because no one's really explaining it that well. 

Ben: And they don't make Tonka Class A vehicles anymore. I never see someone rolling around with their tractor trailer. 

Karl: I’ve seen some of those. 

Dale: I don't know if that helps recruit students, either. I mean, the only guys that are really your core group of truck drivers these days are guys like my age that, you know, have been divorced a couple times and have diabetes and so that doesn't help students get into it either, I don't think.

Karl: Oh, fantastic. 

Ben: Maybe robotics. I'm stretching here, but you know, you put some guy with a Google glass on a gladiator arm thing and now they're a superhero. 

Dale: You know, we've been trying to get robotics into logistics for so long and it hasn't worked that well. Remember the arm that would scan the items on the, yeah, I mean, you can do that, but it's not, you know, robotics, high automation, tend to be inflexible. Now, you know, I got my mind changed a little bit by the Kiva robots, which now is part of Amazon, cause those can be pretty flexible. But think about, and you guys aren’t as old as me, I don't think, but think about 1980 or 1975, how many automated material handling system companies there were versus how many there are now. Three. There's three now. So we've seen incredible consolidation and a lot of warehouses for years I would go into, in the nineties or something, would have the tracks in the floor where they had the automated systems and, of course they just put pallets over the top of it because you weren't using it anymore. So we've been trying to get advanced automation and robotics into warehouses for a long time. And we really haven't come up with the right way to do that yet, I think. Sorry if anybody's selling those in here. 

Karl: Okay. So, maybe to take us home here… 

Dale: Are we done already? Geez. 

Karl: Well, you know, listeners have short tension spans. That's another characteristic of that generation. I asked you earlier, over your career in this space, what has surprised you? What hasn't surprised you? Okay. So now, let's take a forward looking view. What kind of lessons have you learned and witnessed over the years that you think are applicable as people are thinking about the next sort of three to five years? What are the kind of fundamental principles that you would share to say, look, these are the things, in some level it's the what hasn't changed, but like, based on your lessons, what are the things like words of wisdom you'd leave people with, kind of come back to a core principle as you think about navigating the complexities of and whatever kind of next emergency is gonna show up next?

Dale: Well, one of the things you're constantly reminded of in this business is the value of good people. I mean, it's really, you're reminded of it all the time. And if you think about the folks in supply chain management, you know, what we have to do, it can't really be set in advance, like three months, and then we just execute to plan. I remember when I was a young guy sitting around in a forecasting meeting, planning meeting, and the marketing guys were gonna, were saying, okay, we're gonna sell a million dollars this quarter and I was thinking, I gotta know how many blue ones and how many red ones we need to ship to Seattle. A million dollars doesn't really help me. What we have to do every day is so complex and people I think in the supply chain industry, maybe almost more than any other industry are, you know, good people, are so valuable because not just everybody can deal with the incredible complexity and it's one of those things I learn all the time. There was a guy early in my career, he was a friend of Dr. Bowersox and he helped me get the Center for Logistics Management going at the first school I taught at University of Nevada, a guy named Bernie Hale. He had worked for a company called Bergen Brunswig which has been acquired and more several times. And if you go back to the seventies, the pharmaceutical distributors were a threatened industry segment because you had the big chains coming in, Walgreens and CVS and Rite Aid and all those, and the mom and pop pharmacies and all these towns were going away and Bernie was a pioneer. McKesson was the first one to do barcodes, but AmerisourceBergen, Bergen Brunswig, was really, at the same time as, as McKesson and the incredible innovation and the attention to detail. I learned so much from Bernie. I had 'em come up, their office was in Southern California. I was teaching in Reno. I had 'em come up to teach my class. And the way he came up is he got on one of the trucks that was delivering from Orange County, California up to Reno. He rode in the passenger seat and he made stops all night. And then he taught my class that day. And I remember thinking, that kind of human being, it's hard to replicate him. And because he knew both the strategy we were talking earlier about, sort of emergency planning here today and business continuity. And the first business continuity plan I ever saw was 1986, and it was one that Bernie did for Bergen Brunswig. And I'm constantly reminded by how valuable, valuable people are. And what you can do with smart people who are really dedicated and understand the deal of what we have to deal with, which most of the world doesn't understand that detail. It's really complex. You know, supply chain is kind of the wrong name for what we do. It's really supply networks is what we're really doing. And the idea of a network, it fans out very quickly. And the networks we deal with are complex adaptive systems. And we have a thing at ASU, my son came down a few weeks ago. CASN-RA, Complex Adaptive Supply Networks Research Accelerator, and to some extent, supply chain the term, and I'm not, I don't want to change it, I've already changed too many terms in my life, but supply chain kind of minimizes, 'cause it kind of in your head, you think, okay, it's a, it's a horizontal, it's a linear thing when really it's incredibly complex and it's a network. And so, the thing that is happy to me, we're in a time of great political upheaval, but the people in this room aren't really flustered by that very much because they've dealt with a million other things and will work through this, and you know, if anything's reassuring and there's a lot of things that aren't reassuring to me, but if there's anything that's reassuring, it's that. 

Karl: Very well said. Yeah. So we have this, we have this challenge, which we're trying to, you know, attract great talent. It's incredibly important. But, part of the DNA, I think is the ability to navigate through a lot of challenges and then, and frankly, enjoy it. Right. That's part of, that's part of the joy of the job. It's sort of, you know, what is it? Embrace the suck. I've heard that more than once when things go haywire. So thank you for being with us, Dale. It's always a pleasure. We appreciate you being on the podcast, the live podcast, and we look forward to doing this again in an upcoming episode. Thank you very much. 

Dale: Great. Thank you very much. 

Ben: Great talking with you.

Narrator: You've been listening to the Logistics Leadership Podcast presented by Flexe. The opinions of the guests aren't necessarily the views of their company. If you'd like to learn more about the podcast or join the Logistics Leadership community, check out this episode's show notes and visit flexe.com/logisticsleadershippodcast. Keep the conversation going. Email us at leadershippodcast@flexe.com. The Logistics Leadership Podcast features original music by Dyaphonic. The show is produced by Robert Haskitt with Jeff Sullivan, Ben Dean, and Karl Siebrecht. Thanks for joining us.