Art of Supply Kelly Barner, Art of Procurement

On May 25, the Federal Trade Commission announced their consent for the planned acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources by ExxonMobil. It was the largest shale oil and gas merger ever planned.
The consent may not have been a surprise, but one of the conditions was: that former Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield was prohibited from taking a planned seat on ExxonMobil’s board and accused of colluding with other industry players to increase consumer prices and maximize company profits.
Articles began to appear in the media that described the condition, which ExxonMobil did agree to, as “unprecedented,” “unusual,” and even “a smear campaign.”
Is Scott Sheffield a colluding villain or a scapegoat of big oil and the federal government? 
In this episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner brings together details about: 
The structure of the oil market, including U.S. producers as well as OPEC and OPEC+ The case against Scott Sheffield, as made by the FTC and media outlets that side with them The case made in his defense, some in his own words and some from industry onlookers and commentators as well as other media outlets Links:
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The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, took effect in June of 2022 to protect an ethnically Turkish, predominantly Muslim minority that lives in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China. 
The Uyghurs have been the subject of forced labor claims and investigations - truly the stuff of supply chain nightmares. If companies try to import anything connected to Xinjiang into the United States, they must prove conclusively that it did not involve forced labor.
But what if the Uyghurs are moved out of Xinjiang? What does that do to enforcement of the law?
In this episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner looks into the simultaneously expanding and dissolving front line in the war against Uyghur forced labor:
How worker relocation is making it harder for U.S. Customs to enforce the UFLPA Why the specifics of the law may have provided the blueprints for defying it What business leaders and supply chain decision makers will have to grapple with if they want to achieve the intended objectives of this law  Links:
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On April 30th, 2024, the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Personnel, held a hearing about the Department Of Defense’s efforts to ensure service members would have access to safe, high-quality pharmaceuticals.
One of the panelists invited to testify was Victor Suarez, a retired Colonel from the United States Army. He worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) before becoming the Lead Vaccine Program Manager for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine during Operation Warp Speed (2020-2021). Today he is the Founder and Principal Growth Partner at Blu Zone Bioscience & Supply Chain Solutions, LLC.
In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner welcomes Victor to share his frank point of view on why today’s pharmaceutical supply chains are under strain:
Why facilitating the market entry of generic drugs in 1984 led to the scarcity we face today  The surprising challenge (and importance) of defining “Made in the U.S.A.” The solution he sees as the most likely to succeed, especially given the reasonable investment associated with it Links:
Senate Hearing to Receive Testimony on the Department of Defense’s Efforts to Ensure Servicemembers’ Access to Safe, High-Quality Pharmaceuticals Victor Suarez on LinkedIn Kelly Barner on LinkedIn Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter  Art of Supply on AOP Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

Pharmaceutical supply chains are never far from news headlines. Regular drug shortages affect our families, friends, and neighbors when they can’t access their chemotherapy treatments, ADHD medication, and pain medication - just to name a few.
In 2023, Americans spent over $600 Billion on prescription drugs. That’s more than ever before — and more than any other country in the world. 90 percent of the prescriptions are for generic drugs, although they represent only 20 percent of spending.
Pharmaceutical supply chains are complex, highly regulated, global, and associated with HUGE profit margins - but not for all medicines, and the R&D costs are just as astronomical as the profits.
In this week’s episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner attempts to distill one of the most complex supply chains in the world down to some very familiar dynamics:
Profitability, supply chain resilience, and negotiating leverage The differences between brand name and generic drug profit margins  Production issues that exist thanks to global producers, consolidated negotiators like GPOs and wholesalers, and the exacerbating role of insurance companies And what a few groups - including well known Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban - are trying to do about it
Links:
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Some corporations have chosen to wade into socially sensitive waters over the last few years and others have been pushed in from behind. The adoption of a social mission or set of causes at the company level does not guarantee ‘trickle down’ benefits to individual employees.  
The right to free speech is one of the most valued privileges granted in the United States. But it has limitations - something 50 (now former) Google employees discovered the hard way last month.
In this week’s episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner explores the legality of employee speech and social activism in corporate America:
What happened at Google to bring this topic to the forefront? What legal protections do private sector employees have? What next steps - including legal proceedings - do the terminated Googlers have in mind… and how likely are they to work? Links:
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“The first casualty of war is truth—the second is empathy. Empathy has to call for backup. The backup is in the form of radical empathy.”
-Lou Agosta, Assistant Professor of Medical Education at Ross Medical University at Saint Anthony Hospital

We have a difficult six months ahead of us. A contentious presidential election looms in the U.S., the world continues to be war-torn, and companies find themselves mired in social topics that threaten to win over one half of consumers or stakeholders while alienating the other half.
Could consciously practiced empathy make the difference between community success and fragmented failure? Perhaps.
Dr. Helen Riess is the Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Empathy Research and Training in Psychotherapy Research group in the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Hospital. She is also the author of a book called The Empathy Effect.
She has studied not just the power of empathy, but also the ability to monitor it neuroscientifically. Dr Riess may have found proof of something that many leaders believe… empathy is not a soft skill after all.
In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner focuses on empathy as a business strategy:
A review of Dr. Riess’ findings and what they teach us about the physical experience of empathy How empathy can not only be learned and improved over time, it can also be lost or diminished How an expanded understanding of empathy can affect our performance at work - and in life, too
Links:
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