Operating at the edge: firefighters, networks and lessons for minimal disruption during crisis

摘要

Any distant crisis or catastrophe can have ripple effects thousands of miles away and wreak havoc on whole industries. The tsunami of 2011 in Japan disrupted the world supply of flash memory, increasing the price of this component by 20 per cent. In the same year, an E. coli outbreak in northern Germany provoked similar problems in the European food business until the German administrations identified the product that was transmitting the disease. In 2013, economists of the World Economic Forum (2013) announced that supply chain disruptions reduce firms' share price by an average 7 per cent. Such disruptions are typical for the prevalence of network relationships in industries, markets and society. In this case study, I propose to reflect on ways to turn this connectedness into a resource and mitigate disruptions.