For a long time, companies believed that competitive advantage was created mainly inside the organization — through better products, better processes or better management.

That is still true, but it is no longer the full picture. 

In many industries, performance today depends just as much on what happens outside the legal boundary of the company.
Supply chains determine whether production runs or stops.
Suppliers determine how fast innovation can move.
Regulation determines which markets remain accessible.
Energy, logistics and geopolitics influence cost and risk more than internal efficiency programs ever will. 

And sustainability requirements increasingly shape how operations must be designed in the first place. 

It is competing with the strength of its external system.

This has consequences for leadership.
Roles in operations, supply chain, procurement and sustainability are no longer only functional responsibilities.
They increasingly sit at the intersection of performance, risk, regulation and strategy. 

Yet in many organizations, these roles are still defined too narrowly, hired too late, or positioned too low in the hierarchy.

Not because companies do not care — but because the shift has happened gradually, and the leadership model has not fully caught up.

In the coming years, I believe we will see more discussions at CEO and board level about questions like:
Do we have the right leadership for the complexity we operate in?
Do we understand our external dependencies well enough?
And are we treating operations and supply chain as strategic capabilities — or still mainly as tactical support funtions?

These questions come up more often in my conversations with executives across different industries.
And they rarely have simple answers.

Frank Godbersen
Executive Search & Advisory
Operations, Supply Chain, Procurement and Sustainability Leadership