Sheffi featured in new version of bestseller The World is Flat

Pulitzer Prize Winner & NYT columnist Thomas Friedman highlights Sheffi’s thoughts on Supply Chain Management

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 4, 2006  –  MIT Professor and author of The Resilient Enterprise Yossi Sheffi is featured in the updated and expanded version of Thomas L. Friedman’s bestseller The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century released April 2006.

Friedman, a New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, devotes a section of his book to supply chain management, calling it one of the ten “flatteners” of the world.    In this section, he highlights Dr. Sheffi and his research in supply chain management. 

Friedman writes, “To appreciate how important supply-chaining has become as a source of competitive advantage and profit in a flat world, think about this one fact: Wal-Mart today is the biggest retail company in the world, and it does not make a single thing.  All it ‘makes’ is as hyperefficient supply chain.   As Yossi Sheffi, an expert on supply-chain management and a professor of engineering systems at MIT likes to say, ‘Making stuff – that’s easy.  Supply chain, now that is really hard.’"

Friedman goes on to discuss Professor Sheffi’s thoughts on global optimization and postponement citing examples from companies such as Wal-Mart, Zara and Dell.  At the end of the section, Friedman writes, “The bottom line, concluded Sheffi, is that in a flat world… a smart and fast global supply chain is becoming one of the most important ways for a company to distinguish itself from its competitors.”

The World Is Flat is Thomas L. Friedman's account of the great changes taking place in our time, as lightning-swift advances in technology and communications put people all over the globe in touch as never before-creating an explosion of wealth in India and China, and challenging the rest of us to run even faster just to stay in place.  This updated and expanded edition features more than a hundred pages of fresh reporting and commentary.


Read entire excerpt from The World is Flat featuring author Yossi Sheffi