In this episode of Beyond Page One, we delve into the intricate world of supply chain management with a seasoned industry leader who has navigated some of the most complex challenges in global logistics. With nearly 15 years of experience, our guest shares invaluable insights into the strategies that have shaped his remarkable career, from hands-on beginnings to leading large-scale operations. He reveals the critical leadership principles that guide his approach, the evolving role of AI and data, and the surprising challenges that come with scaling a global network. Whether you’re an aspiring professional or a seasoned expert, this conversation offers a unique perspective on what it takes to succeed in the ever-changing landscape of supply chain management.

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Communicate Your Leadership Style Clearly: Ensure your team understands your leadership principles and the benefits of following them.

Network Within Your Industry: Consistently build and maintain relationships within your industry, even during hectic times.

Implement Structured Operations: Develop and adhere to structured procedures to enhance operational efficiency and scalability.

Delegate Strategic Responsibilities: Hire skilled team members and delegate critical tasks to drive growth and operational efficiency.

Focus on Your Core Strengths: Define and leverage your core strengths to attract the right opportunities and provide specialized services.

Educate Through Thought Leadership: Use content like podcasts and blogs to educate your audience and establish yourself as an industry expert.
Build Strong Team Connections: Engage with your team on a personal level to foster a collaborative and motivated work environment.
Emphasize Operational Transparency: Maintain transparency in your operations to build trust with your team and clients.
Specialize in Your Niche: Identify your niche market and focus on providing specialized services that cater to that specific audience.

Mickey (00:00)

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mickey. I’m the host of the Beyond Page One podcast where we dive deep into the entrepreneurial spirits and so to speak beyond the first page, beyond the cover to find out what ticks the entrepreneur and how they came up. Today’s guest, I’m excited to announce is Tanmay Mathur. He leads XPO’s Linehaul Networking. He manages their networking operations, purchases transportation spending, and network optimization. He also oversees the development of proprietary algorithms to optimize XPO’s complex network and there’s a lot that he does too. He’s got nearly 15 years in supply chain Experience and logistics planning and I’m excited to have him here to me. How are you?

Tanmay Mathur (00:41)

I’m very good. Mickey, how are you?

Mickey (00:43)

I’m good, I’m good, thank you. Tanmay, do you have it? Yeah, we’re excited to have you here. You’ve had an impressive career trajectory. What was young Tanmay like?

Tanmay Mathur (00:45)

Thanks for having me here, very brash and inexperienced and that’s stupid like most of us are. I think I’m more of a student of supply chain now than I was when I was 21 years and a year old entering the workforce. I think like most young kids, I thought I knew everything and was smarter than everyone else and I wasn’t.

Mickey (01:16)

Yeah, was there any early experience or passion that hinted at your future in the world of supply chain and logistics?

Tanmay Mathur (01:24)

I kind of stumbled into the supply chain in somewhat of an accident. I came from a modest background, so I had never stepped out of my hometown until I went to college. So my first job was with Shell in the oil industry. And during the interview, they asked me, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I’ve never traveled anywhere. So if you have a job that makes me travel, I’ll take that. So they made me go audit every single manufacturing plant they had across Europe, Africa, and Asia. So that was my first exposure to supply chain, which was going and auditing all these manufacturing plants. And I was doing that because I wanted to travel and I traveled to 40 countries in about 18, 20 months. But during that time, I got exposure to these manufacturing sites and I started falling in love with what they were doing. Things like just getting used to being in a place where the actual product is being made.

Granted the product itself was industrial lubricants and not a cool or sexy product. But just idea of like I’m doing something that is rolling off the line and it’s getting sold in the market, getting loaded on the trucks and going. And the fact that there were thousands of people around me, was just amazing. The facilities were impressive. The people were amazing. And I did a bunch of different roles after that in brand management and private equity and stuff like that. But I kept going to the fact that I loved working in a manufacturing environment with hundreds and thousands of people. That was my early introduction just by accident and I fell in love with and check.

Mickey (00:00)

So yeah, with Amazon, has a renowned complex supply chain. So how did you manage to scale the complexity in designing and managing such a vast transportation network with Amazon?

Tanmay Mathur (00:00)

I think some of it sort of happened organically. We started realizing that the supply chain we had wasn’t enough for the needs of the customer. So things like we were in the beginning, we’re delivering on a promise of two to five-day delivery. Then over time,, it became prime two-day delivery and then it became prime one-day delivery. I was part of that experience. And we realized that customers, think Jeff said it, are eternally unsatisfied.

So customers wanted more so not only they want same next day delivery. They want same-day delivery They want overnight delivery. So I think the supply chain sort of had to adapt to cater to that which means the logistics network had to adapt which means the way you store inventory has to adapt meaning you can’t store everything in just one warehouse in Arizona and expect to deliver it next day or same day You need to start storing it in different warehouses around the country.

Same way logistics had to change so that you can pick up the product today and deliver it tonight rather than picking it up today and delivering it in two days. I think that changed. And I think the biggest change that is now happening is just a giant globalization. not that it wasn’t global in the past. I think the product was still being made in Asia and being transported.

But now there are companies like Shein and Temu that have come in where you can order the product that hasn’t been made yet. And they have the product, once you order, they’ll make it and then they’ll ship it. So not only we go into micro fulfillment to get it by tomorrow or get it by today from where I was in your city, but we’re also going to get a macro scale or global scale where you can order stuff that hasn’t been made yet, which will be made once you order and shipped weeks and get it to you, get it to your doorstep. So a different version of just -in -time and that has evolved. So a whole bunch of things has changed in e-commerce, and logistics over the last 15 years.

Mickey (02:01)

Yeah, it’s crazy how quickly it evolved. It’s still evolving, right? Like, you we can have this, we can have another conversation in a year from now and it might be completely different.

Tanmay Mathur (02:05)

Yeah, It absolutely will be. don’t think that three or four years ago, we were talking about ultra-fast delivery as much as we are talking about today. There are companies like Co -Puff and these companies have come in, which are now delivering in 30 minutes. Now there’s a different challenge of how to make it profitable. But at least we have consumers who want that. I don’t want to to Walmart, drive to Walmart,, and pick it up. I can order on Co-Puff and get it in 30 minutes. Whether it’s profitable for them is a different question and a different challenge, at least consumers want it and it’s getting faster and faster.

Mickey (02:44)

Yeah, 100%. What leadership principles have guided you throughout your career and how have they evolved?

Tanmay Mathur (02:54)

I don’t think there’s any single leadership principle that has been the same throughout my career, but I think I’ve landed on two big ones in the last, sort of my experiences culminated into two big ones for me. One is to find the right people and hire the right people to do their job. That is probably 50%, if not more of my job in the last four or five years. Because if you have the right team, everything else becomes a lot easier not just in terms of capability, and skill set, but also culture fit. It’s a lot easier to deal with hard problems when you like your colleagues and when you have a champion team. They’re the same, A players hire A plus players and B players hire C players. So you always want people who are better than you, more capable than you, smarter than you. And they will do things that you can do, especially at a global scale or even the scale of North America.

You can’t do everything yourself. So you need people who can do things better than you and who can do things that you haven’t thought about. Otherwise, you will always constrain your team to what you can think, which I don’t think is a great winning strategy. And the other one is sort of caring about customers or putting customers at the center of everything that you do. It’s very easy. And I’ve been part of organizations where customers sort of become the back burner and it becomes internally focused and we start doing things that we think are valuable for us and we lose sight of what matters to customers. I think Amazon was good at it. They had a bunch of different mechanisms in place to make sure that everything that we did was focused on the customer or was benefiting the customer in some sense. But we need to keep reminding ourselves customers are the ones who are paying our bills or paying our salaries. So everything that we do has to make life easier or better for, even if it is rough, and don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean that we don’t do things for our employees or to make our operations better. But we have to think from the lens that if we make life easier for our employees and they’re happier to be there, they’re going to make things better for the customer. So everything leads to them. But I think those two are the biggest ones that have finally landed on in terms of principles of what that guide means. is customer focus and second is get the right people in your team in the right.

Mickey (05:09)

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. the, know, getting the right people in your team, it, takes me back to something that my mentor said to me a long time ago and I hold to it, it’s a good saying. It’s if, if you’re the smartest person in the room, find a new room. And I really, get smarter people in the room. Yeah.

Tanmay Mathur (05:23)

Yeah, or get smarter people in the room. And this is one thing that I’ve seen people stumble a little bit on, especially at the executive level, that it’s very nice to feel that you’re the smartest guy in the room and everyone is agreeing with you. And that’s a pitfall. If nobody disagrees with you, then either they’re not smart enough to think differently, or you have created a culture where everyone is going to do what you say. And at some point,, you’re going to be wrong and it’s going to fall apart. So it’s very difficult and very deliberate decision to hire people who are different and better than you. We all like ourselves and we all want to have people around us who are exactly like us. It takes a big leader to hire people who are different from themselves and who are better than themselves. And that’s been my biggest learning. It’s very easy, very difficult, and very deliberate.

Mickey (06:16)

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with you. You emphasize delivering outstanding customer experience as something important. How do you ensure that customer satisfaction remains a top priority in operations?

Tanmay Mathur (06:27)

I think it depends on the industry. For example, in companies like Amazon or Walmart, it’s relatively easy because everything that you are selling, you’re going to use it yourself. So it’s very easy to connect with the customer thinking that, well, on holiday, I’m packing a gift bag. It’s very easy to tell people or experience yourself that the thing that you’re packing is someone’s Christmas present or someone’s birthday gift. And that sort of makes a connection instantly.

It’s slightly harder in B2B businesses where we make lubricants or pipes or machinery. But a couple of ways to do that is to get the customers in your operations. I’ve been part of different companies where, for example, to bring customers to the warehouses or service centers and throw them around. And that’s two things. One is it’s a great experience for customers to see how their product is being handled. And the second is it gives employees an idea that whatever they’re doing is for a reason. are real customers who care about what they’re doing, and who are paying their bills. They come and then they see what they’re doing. So it gives a purpose to what you do. And by the way, there’s a third hidden benefit your operations are always top-class if you are always expecting guests. It’s like your home, right? If you’ve never expecting guests, that’s going to be sort of messy. But the day you know that guests are coming, you’re going to clean up. It’s the same thing in warehouses and operations. That if you know a customer’s going to show up today, you’re going to have top-notch operations. And if you know that customers can come up anytime, you’re always going to be that good. yeah, so it’s off as an internally focused benefit, but also for the employees to connect with the customers. And the last thing is, most of us, or most employees care about what their manager, their boss, is going to care about. If your boss, or my boss doesn’t care about customers, it’s unlikely that I’m going to care about it. So it has to go at every single level from the CEO down to maybe the supervisor or an hourly worker. Every single person has to care about customers. Nobody in the whole chain should be saying, screw the customer, let’s make more money. Well, you’re not going to make more money by screwing that. So everyone has to demonstrate the same idea or same idea or same philosophy. And then over time, will start populating. It’s not going to happen on the same day. Hopefully,, you start the company with the same mindset. Amazon was started with that mindset. But if you’re trying to change the mindset of the company, it’s going to take time and everyone has to say the same thing, and believe in the same thing. And you have to do that over and over again till people start believing in it. If you change at some then it falls apart.

Mickey (09:01)

Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more with you. That’s awesome. You’ve been very instrumental in building high-performing teams and driving operational excellence. Can you share some of your approaches without telling all the trade secrets of how to, how your approach for talent acquisition?

Tanmay Mathur (09:18)

I think we talked about it a little bit in the earlier question where you have to find people who are better than you. You have to identify what your weaknesses are, and what your blind spots are, and start building the team. And that starts with your direct side. Your direct team has to be somewhat diversified in terms of their skills talent, their thought process. You have to find those kind of people.

Second, you have to trust them. Once you hire high-performing individuals, you can bring them and micromanage them. The whole point of getting high-performing people is more. So you have to trust them. You have to give them big challenges. Trust them to do the right thing. Their success is their own. Their failure is yours. You have to make sure that they feel protected, that they can go and fail, and you’re going to be okay with that, or you’re going to protect them. You’re not going to fire them with the first mistake they make.

It’s important to learn from the mistakes, so make sure that you find people who are willing to learn from the mistakes instead of just making the same mistake over and over again. That’s our red flag. But hire the right people for the right job, right? The job fit has to be important. Trust them to do the right thing. Give them big challenges and reward them when they succeed. You have to be willing to pay them if that’s what is needed.

Different people get motivated by different things, right? Some people just get about doing fantastic jobs. Some people care about career progression and stuff like that. So you have to be ready to do what otherwise what is it in it for them? So there is one. And then second, be involved in hiring decisions at different levels, right? So there have been times where I’ve hired, I think one of my jobs in Amazon, I started a team with 20 people and built it to about 80.

So, over time, we added 60. We hired 100 and then we lost some and there was some attrition. So net-net we hired 60 more and I interviewed every one of them. And my directs also interviewed them, but I wanted to make sure that when we were building the team, I wanted to build the right culture. And that time investment in interviewing every one of them was worth it because we were able to find the right people. We were able to identify the people who we wanted to keep.

Obviously,some of them did work out, and that’s fine. But it seemed from the outside, it might seem like a waste of time to hire everyone, interview everyone, but it’s worth the investment because it’s your own, treated as your own business. And when you’re involved with hiring at every level, obviously when you’re managing very, very large teams, you can’t interview everyone. But in that process of interviewing some people, you’re gonna at least be able to and understanding with your team on what kind of team we are building, and what kind of people you want to bring in. And hopefully,, tht will percolate over and over as they continue to hire more people. It’s hard, but I think the job of a leader, especially a big supply chain leader, 70 % of that job is to find the right people and make sure that they’re in the right roles. Everything else becomes very easy. If you don’t have the right leader, then 30 % of your job is going to take up 100 % of your time.

But if you do 70 % of the job right, which is getting the right people in the door, everything else becomes very easy. Then they’re going to do things that you didn’t even think of. And then life is going to be cool.

Mickey (12:28)

Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s mind-blowing to me to have people, to have such a large amount of people under one kind of company, and how to manage that many people. So, I mean, you’ve led large-scale operations with thousands of employees. How do you ensure effective communication and collaboration across such a vast workforce?

Tanmay Mathur (12:51)

It’s very hard. It’s very hard. They’re saying culture eats strategy for breakfast. So to answer your question on communication, I think you have to figure out the culture. Everything else is going to follow that. And especially when you’re leading or when you have teams across different cities or different warehouses or manufacturing units, it’s very hard, right? Because none of them are there at the same

Many of them are operating 24 seven. So even if you go and talk to all of them in that warehouse, all of them are not going to be in the same location. So you can not meet all of them at the same time. So it becomes harder and harder with bigger teams. The key is I think you have to keep the communication simple and you have to keep the communication consistent. If you’re going to talk about different things every time you meet them or every time you have a town hall, you can have a whole bunch of things, right? You can have town halls, fireside chats, can have one-time monthly presentations and stuff like that. But you have to keep it consistent, the message, and you have to keep it simple. BRemember if 5,000 people are working in different warehouses, they’re all going to remember different things from what you said. So the shorter the message, the more consistent the message, the more they’re going to remember, or the more they’re going to retain. So it has to be consistent. It has to be the same. And you have to talk you have to make sure that at every level in the organization you’re talking about the same thing. What cannot happen is that you will talk about safety in front of the employees in the warehouse and then you come back to the corporate office and you forget about safety completely. Then it’s not going to last. So the communication has to be the same at every level. It has to be consistent and it has to be frequent. It cannot change month to because many of these employees have been around for a long time. have seen leaders like you come and go. So they can wait it out. So you say safety is important today, tomorrow another leader is gonna come and it’s gonna say quality is important. And the day after tomorrow, it’s gonna be customers. So that message cannot change because you will come and go, they will stay and they will remember. So you must communicate the same message over and over again and you believe in it and you can communicate the same thing at every level in the organization. And hopefully, that translates. And make sure you invest in a good communications team. There are a lot of tools, a of technology tools out there that helps you with that. If you have the right team in place in communication, they can help you figure out how to communicate. But the message has to be clear.

Mickey (15:20)

Yeah, it kind of comes from the top down and the same message needs to come from the top down. Yeah, that makes sense. Given the increasing complexity of the global supply chain, what role do you see data analytics and specifically AI playing and optimizing operations and mitigating risks?

Tanmay Mathur (15:24)

Yeah.

Yeah, mean, AI is relatively new in terms of how it’s influencing the supply chain, but the use of data has been around and the use of big data has been around for at least as long as I’ve been working. One of my first authors used to say, I believe in God, but for everything else show me the data. So it’s incredibly important to use data to find trends or use data to make decisions. Again, it goes back to hiring the right smart people. Some people are incredibly talented in crunching numbers and figuring out better decisions to make, automating decisions, especially in the supply chain when you’re trying to figure out how much to order and er, what to order. That can’t be done manually anymore. are thousands and thousands of things that are being sold in different packs and varieties. You have to use data and at a large enough scale that you can do that on Excel manually. So it’s an error of big data. So you need people who can find trends and automate processes of buying and decision-making. You need to audit it and then make sure that data is still telling you the right thing, pointing you in the right direction. But I think it all comes down to data, especially if you’re managing large businesses.

But the auditing part is important. A good example is I think during COVID, there were some companies, including Amazon, where the sales went through the roof because everyone was sitting at home and ordering online rather than being able to go out and buy things. And that drove the sales above historical levels. The ordering systems caught on to that and continued to order at high quantities, assuming that trend is gonna continue. But obviously at some point pandemic came to an end and then sales moderated out or flattened out and a whole bunch of retailers were left with a ton of inventory and then sales flowed down. So you have to sort of use the data, but you also have to apply it, common sense and logic and do audits and checks to make sense of that. But this is the era of big data. You can’t run large companies sophisticated algorithms and software and people who can manage them. And the same thing now is coming with AI. I think it’s just a logical next step that the complexity that humans are now is becoming more complex. And now there are a whole bunch of places where you can apply AI to make decisions or manage things like there’s a hurricane season in Florida every year. There’s enough data in the past to figure out what happens when that happens, what places are shut down, what places are affected, and what routes are shut down. You can use that mass data to figure out when the next time that happens, what kind of decisions we need to be making. The same thing happens in the Midwest when there’s a snow event. Every year we have a bunch of locations that are under three, four, or five feet of snow and data can help us figure out what to do in that, what mistakes we made in the past, how to monitor that, and how to manage that situation. I think that the applications are enormous.

We are just getting started on that. But don’t make the mistake that the part of using data is not new. It’s been around for years and companies that have used it very well are like Amazon, which has been very successful. It’s just that AI is the next logical step in that direction.

Mickey (18:45)

Yeah, it’s almost like taking the AI to crawl that data instead of a human to come up with logical conclusions from that data. And then having a human look over and be like, yes or no.

Tanmay Mathur (18:55)

Yeah. And there was a great way to audit some of that in Amazon was looking, hearing from customers or customer anecdotes, because sometimes data can not necessarily lie, but pointing in the wrong direction. But talking to customers sort of keeps you grounded on the actual problem that the customer is facing. And sometimes that’s called counter. Every time customer feedback was counter to data, we went with customer feedback and almost always that was the right thing to do

Mickey (19:21)

So, I mean, this is you briefly touched on this, but in the supply chain, disruptions have become increasingly common, obviously, weather events, world events, COVID, call it whatever it is. How do you build resilience into your operations to minimize the impact of, known, unforeseen challenges? And you can’t, there’s going to be challenges regardless.

Tanmay Mathur (19:41)

Yeah, that’s a tough part. I mean, you need your team to be ready for those things. Unfortunately, I haven’t and people have spoken to in my industry haven’t figured out a great way to teach resilience. Some people are by nature resilient to adversity. Some people learn from adversity and become stronger. Some people don’t like adversity and leave.

So you can find resilient people, I don’t know if you can teach it. But to your point, you can prepare for it. We did a lot of stress tests. So stress the system for two or three hours, the same way it’s gonna be tested in peak season or peak weather events for a day or two. So sort of give everyone an idea of what it’ll feel like. So you can do tests create extensive plans. I think in Amazon, people like to write documents on those plans, which I think is a great idea because when you’re forced to write full sentences on what you’re gonna do, it makes you think more deeply and more thoroughly. So not necessarily for others to read, but just for you to learn or prepare better, you sort of start writing your plans and having your team write those plans.

Tanmay Mathur (20:52)

I think those are the few things you can do every time there is an event like that. Make sure you capture lessons learned and share those and do it quickly because six months later you’re going to forget what happened in the last Christmas time. So make sure you have those lessons right after the Christmas holiday. But yeah, I don’t have a great answer. I don’t think you can teach that. I think you can prepare and practice.

But at some point, you have to drink from the fire hose and live through it and hopefully, you come out better and learn from it and keep getting better.

Mickey (21:21)

Yeah, no, and I couldn’t agree more with you. I like the stress testing part of it and, you know, trying to run as real-life of a scenario as you possibly can with the people in the systems to see how handles it. And you’re going to learn from those mistakes. It’s cool. Sustainability, it’s a big buzzword, you know, and it’s a critical factor for many businesses. How do you integrate sustainability into your supply chain strategies?

Tanmay Mathur (21:47)

I think I get that it’s a buzzword, but I don’t think it’s necessarily counter to the goals of the supply chain. So for example, when I ran a logistics network, the goal was to run fewer and fewer miles because the more miles you run, the more money you’re to spend. So the goal of sustainability is to reduce carbon footprint in that instance you want to run fewer miles in the most energy-efficient vehicles which is the same goal of a supply chain. You want to the fewest miles, and spend the least amount of money on energy. The biggest spend generally is fuel. So you want to have the most fuel-efficient vehicle, which runs on the most efficient route. So in that sense, the goal of the supply chain was the same as the goal of sustainability. So I don’t think we need to treat sustainability as an investment as a buzzword or as something that we need to do differently. I think the goal is the same.

It does require at times an upfront investment, which pays over time, which I think one, that not all companies are capable of making because companies have limited resources, but also at times companies are hesitant to make because sometimes either the technology is improving or the technology is too expensive. So a good example is electric trucks or hydrogen fuel cell trucks. From a sustainability point of view, electric trucks are fantastic.

From a supply chain point of view, the trucks haven’t evolved to the point that I can run them for 500 miles without charging them for 12 hours. So the technology isn’t quite there, but once the technology gets there, I would love to have them because, well, why won’t I? It’s a lot cheaper, and a lot better for the environment. The same thing goes for hydrogen fuel cell trucks. They actually, I think the ones I have seen, they go 500, 600 miles without charging, and then it takes 20 minutes to refuel them. So that’s the same as diesel and it’s cheaper, the charging is cheaper, and it has no carbon emissions. The key is that the upfront cost of investment is twice as much as a diesel truck. So you pay twice as much, but then you recover that money within the next two, or three years. So it requires upfront investment, which requires some companies to flex. Larger companies can do that better than smaller companies. So there is a trade-off there in terms of upfront investment versus long-term investment. But I don’t think the goal itself is any different for sustainability than any supply chain. So I’m a big fan of sustainability because it makes both the cost efficiency and in general operations better and of course has a great impact on it. But I want to make sure that people understand it’s not necessarily counterintuitive. It’s not counter to everything that we do in the business already.

Mickey (24:20)

Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a favorite client story or a favorite memory that you’ve experienced working within the last 15 years in this field?

Tanmay Mathur (24:29)
They are, so in the early part, when I was, I started as a frontline supervisor in Amazatat. And at that time, the company was still, it was big, but it was still smaller than what it is now. So a lot of our packages were going within the relatively smaller area of the warehouse, near the warehouse. And there were so many times when we missed a shipment that didn’t make it to the truck on time and it’s two days before Christmas. We know that this other gift for someone and you know if this is it and that was the last order time that they can order and we have driven that we have put packages in our cars and driven to the customers and deliver it to them. There are so many of those instances. It was amazing and that’s what I truly loved about working at Amazon or working for companies that that’s deliver products, one, the experience of doing that is just, there’s a different level of excitement. There’s a different level of adrenaline when you’re loading a bunch of packages in your car and delivering them. It can be like Santa, right? Or an elf of the Santa. It gives you a different meaning, right? When you’re sitting with your friends in holidays, it gives a different meaning of your work compared to many friends you might have. I’m not trying to demean anyone else’s job, but it just, in that moment, it felt like my job has a purpose, has a meaning. Yeah. And sometimes those gifts were toys for kids. Think about that. You were delivering a Christmas present for a child. And that feeling will make everything that we did up to that point. And we were working six, seven days, 16, 17, 18 hours a day straight up to Christmas, from Thanksgiving to Christmas. And that feeling of taking out all the effort that we put in and just making everything worth it.

Mickey (26:18)

That’s cool. That’s a great story. What advice would you give to a young professional who’s aspiring to build a career in supply chain and logistics?

Tanmay Mathur (26:21)

Well, get your hands dirty, jump in. So one of the reasons or main reason I started at Amazon, I got my MBA from Harvard. So there were relatively good options available for a job. And there were many times I realized that there were many other ways to make money with less time than I was working. I was working nights, I was working weekends.

There were easier ways to make the same money. But if you are passionate about something, so I was passionate about supply chain, jump in as early as you can. So I joined Amazon because that was a great way to start at the warehouse level, frontline, working with a whole bunch of hourly employees. Because the experience you’re gonna get there is not gonna be anything that you can experience anywhere else in corporate. So while it’s easy to sort of sit on the 23rd floor in Seattle and look at data and sort of make decisions. But remember, if you want to be a big leader in the supply chain, you have to go to the floor and do the job that the lowest-level employee is doing, the most basic job. Learn that job, learn what the motivation of those people is, because at some point you’re going to lead them. And if you don’t understand them, if you don’t understand their motivations, you’re not going to be able to lead them. So get your hands dirty, it’s a very tough job to do that job for a few years before you sort of jump into corporate roles and stuff like that. And if you look around, most leaders, many CEOs have come from that level. They’ve worked at that. Many CEOs, after becoming CEO, go back and experience that. I think the new CEO of Starbucks, went and worked as a barista for six months in Starbucks stores.

Right. So you may not come from that background, but if you have a chance, if you have a choice, go do that because the things you’re going to learn there, nobody is going to be able to teach them. Nothing in Harvard prepared me for that experience. So that was a crash course in leadership that wasn’t taught with a $200,000 tuition in two years. It’s hard work, but it’s going to be a learning for life. So my advice is to get your hands dirty, jump in, and do the hard job.

Mickey (28:22)

Yeah, no kidding. Awesome. That’s fantastic advice. I got one last question for you. And it’s a broad question, but where do you see the supply chain industry heading in, let’s say the next five to 10 years?

Tanmay Mathur (28:44)

That’s a very hard question. don’t think many of us, including me, anticipated where the supply chain is today, especially when COVID came. COVID sort of accelerated the growth of e-commerce and supply chain by three, or four years, in a matter of one or two years. I think it’s hard to predict, but I do think that there are a few indicators. I think the fulfillment is going to get faster and faster. Customers are dissatisfied with the delivery experience. So the quality of delivery is going to get better. It’s going to get faster, or it has to. Why would I want something in two days and I can’t get it in one day? I think the challenge is going to be how to make it efficient, cost-efficient, and sustainable. So I think we will see a lot of improvement in the way things are being delivered. Drones are just starting, electric vehicles are on the road.

I think the packaging is due for a sort of next-game-changing idea. We have seen a whole bunch of sustainable packaging material, but I think we have seen no packaging delivery kind of thing, right? Why waste time in packaging when you’re going to package it and then deliver it to me in two hours and then I’m going to open that packaging and throw it again? Why do all that? So I think there’s something there. And the other thing is I think the global part of the supply chain is just starting. I think

Mickey (29:48)

Good job.

Tanmay Mathur (29:56)

The one piece that a few companies like Flexport and Merzcar are attacking is how to pick up your stuff from China and deliver it to a warehouse or even to a customer without the multiple touch points that are there right now. So for example, right now you have to pick up the shipment from a factory in China, travel on the road, give it to the port, go on the ship, and get it delivered to the US clear the customs again, trade edge, again, go on the road, and deliver it, right? So no one solution manages the whole thing. You’re dealing with five, or six different brokers or people and all that is, think, can be integrated. I think there are a few companies like Flexport that are attacking that. I think that seems like the next big thing. And I don’t think it’s five years away. I think it’s maybe one to three years away, but that thing is going to get compressed.

What that is going to do probably is that it’s going to allow you to order more stuff that hasn’t been made, hasn’t been stored in the US yet, but can be made with the moment you order, which means a wider selection of things. You will like that shirt in that pattern, in that design. Please, we’ll make it today and get it delivered to you as soon as possible as soon as possible in a week or faster. And I think that is just starting. It’s going to be pretty exciting when we get there.

Mickey (31:14)

Yeah, that’s something to look forward to. I’m excited to see where it goes. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time, Tanmay, and to our listeners. We’re going to link his LinkedIn and any of his social medias below. If you have any questions, I’m sure he’d be happy to answer them, so reach out. Tanmay, I’m going to ask you to hang out for a second after I end the call. But again, thank you to our listeners, and thank you to Tanmay today. I appreciate your time.

Tanmay Mathur (31:19)

Yeah, me too. Thank you, Mickey.