Your Metrics Are Hiding the Heroics

What does your team do that doesn't make it to the exec summary?

Here are a few quotes from my recent conversations:

📌 “It can take a week for us to get a PO out… it sits on someone’s desk for days waiting for approval.”
📌 “We only found out about the supplier delay because our planner asked.”
📌 “I've gotten used to hearing the master scheduler go, 'Oh, shoot, we have to pivot and change around some jobs.'”
📌 “We'll copy an old PO missing the new engineering revision… now we can't hold the supplier liable… it has to be put through our machine shop.”

This is death by a thousand cuts.

Charlie Munger’s advice on inversion is gold: Know where you’ll die, and never go there.

In supply chain ops, success is measured against targets like OTIF, lead times, and schedule adherence but the manual work and last-minute heroics required to hit them don’t make the weekly review.

Instead of asking, “How do we improve OTIF?”, try, “What would have to break for us to miss?”

Nobody's tallying up the risks introduced by chasing updates, reconciling information, and coordinating handoffs to save the production schedule or customer commitment. In my experience, teams lose a quarter of their time on this drag. That’s like hiring 4 people and only having 3 do actual work.

This isn’t a people problem. It’s structural.

These cracks in the process are treated as the cost of doing business when they should be the diagnostic: where are you compressing decision windows and forcing heroics?

There's no metric for “fragility eliminated this quarter”, and fixes like expediting have become an expensive crutch that masks the real problem. It’s duct tape on a broken workflow, allowing you to tolerate gaps.

Run the inversion. Where do the wheels come off?