Designing Supply Chains: Decisions, Tradeoffs, and Consequences

This book reframes supply chain management as a discipline of judgment, system design, and strategic tradeoffs rather than a narrow exercise in optimization. Moving deliberately beyond formula-driven, process-heavy textbooks, it focuses on how real supply chains behave under uncertainty, power asymmetries, conflicting incentives, and recurrent disruptions. Through tightly written micro-cases and concept-driven chapters, the book equips graduate students and practitioners to think clearly when assumptions fail and data is incomplete. Designed primarily as a modular supplementary text for MBA and executive programs, it complements traditional operations courses by provoking debate, sharpening managerial intuition, and highlighting why many “best practices” succeed in theory but collapse in practice.