Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Details on tech innovations, sustainability, and other programs Mike mentions are on DHL’s website at https://www.dhl.com/global-en/delivered.html. To dig even deeper, read DHL: Three Letters that Shrank the World by Jane Chung for Kindle at https://amzn.to/3MgwHIa.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

She’s also written several award-winning books on leadership development. You can peruse and purchase them here. Most relevant for today’s interview is the Innovative Leaders Guide to Transforming Organizations. The Guide is available now on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3KufXMg, and the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/3U7MzyK.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Hello, I Must Be Going: The Mostly True Story of an Imaginary Band by David Meyers
• Batman/Catwoman by Tom King & Clay Mann
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Snow White & the Seven Robots by Louise Simonson & Jimena Sanchez

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• Let’s Talk: Four Steps to Bridging Workplace, Political, & Family Disagreements with Mike Morrow-Fox
• Empathy, Dialogue, & a Good Mood: What Leaders Need in Crisis with Ambassador Thomas Greminger & Peter Cunningham
• Work, War, & In-Between: An International Peace Negotiator’s Top Tips for Resolving Conflict with John, Lord Alderdice

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Mike McLellan is a Vice President of Operations for DHL Supply Chain.  In a career spanning 30 years, Mike has worked with a number of large retail and ecommerce companies focusing on big box warehousing and their supporting supply chains.  Mike holds a BS in Workforce Leadership from University of Louisville and resides in Atlanta, GA.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:08
Welcome to Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. I’m delighted to be joined today by Mike McClellan. He’s a vice president of operations for DHL Supply Chain, and we’re going to be talking today about how supply chains leverage innovation, sustainability, and other governance programs to help enhance and create value. Mike, I’m delighted that you have joined us today.

Speaker 1 0:37
Thank you, Maureen. I am delighted to be here as well.

Maureen 0:40
How has supply chain evolved and recovered post pandemic? Because we all know that we were actively watching ships off the coast of Long Beach and everyplace else full of containers.

Speaker 1 0:54
What a lot of people don’t realize is that COVID didn’t necessarily create supply chain issues, but they rather highlighted already existing challenges that were already out there. Supply chain is a cost, and there is always a driver to lessen cost in supply chains. Manufacturing costs have driven people to go offshore or into Mexico for the cheapest labor possible. Cheapest transportation means that you’re generally shipping things over in containers from offshore manufacturing locations. What Covid did is it highlighted that there were problems within these supply chains. So, a single source of manufacturing in China became a problem when China shut down during Covid, having transportation tied up in shipping when most of the ports, like you mentioned in Long Beach, when there became a wall of COVID in Long Beach, I think at one time I heard something like 700 plus ships waiting to get into the port. That transportation cost, then even though it was the cheapest alternative, it really created bottlenecks. I heard of people that were trying to bypass the COVID wall in the ports by transporting things by air, which you know again created additional costs, but we actually had to do whatever we could to get freight into the United States. Demand changed, you know, people were locked down and they started purchasing more things for their homes, or they started going to online. A lot of people were not prepared for that. There were certain things, like I had a son at the Naval Academy at the time, and, and they locked down the Naval Academy. They, they shut it down for a few months. They did not have a way to do online schooling at the time, so they had to develop that throughout Covid. There were a lot of things that happened during Covid that really we were not prepared for. Now, as people look to fix their supply chain, they’re having to look at different ways of doing business. That’s what we’ve seen a move towards in the last year or two. People that did not have ways to distribute e-commerce, they now have that, or are moving towards that. People are now having to create more capacities to make sure that they’re closer, they have enough capacity or enough product to supply to their customers. Customer demands haven’t changed at all, just the supply chain closer has changed.

Maureen 3:09
How do you see it evolving as organizations are having a clearer understanding of what’s shifting, and yet what’s shifting now is going to shift again, it seems like in five minutes, depending on whatever the next thing is.

Speaker 1 3:25
The focus now is resilience, you know, really taking a look at where you’re at and having to bounce back from the next disruption and get to what is considered normal supply chain operations. I don’t think that supply chain operations will ever be strictly normal, but you know all that comes with a cost. So, as I mentioned, multi-source origins, whereas we used to take a look at sourcing in one country. If you look at China or Taiwan, and the potential for disruptions in those areas, having to single source into those areas is no longer an option. Capacity is another issue where we’re seeing a lot of people taking a look at what their capacities are. We have some companies that actually single sourcing one building or in one location, whereas now they’re taking a look at bicoastal operations or moving to a redundant operation where they can have multi sources out there, redundant manufacturing or distribution staffing a headcount is another big thing right now. One thing that we faced during Covid was headcount issues, staffing issues. A lot of people exited the workforce before Covid hit. There was a report that I used to quote quite often, I can’t remember how old it is, it’s probably at least five or six years old, that stated that supply chain leaders will be in short supply by 300,000 people right around this time, and I can tell you that that number is escalating as we speak. There is a greater need for supply chain workers and leaders. Supply chains are becoming more critical to manufacturing and operations overall, retail. Making sure that we have the right staffing ahead count is more and more critical all the time, but you know we’re doing that against an exiting workforce or workforce that never really came back. We saw expenses increased by about 50% during Covid. A lot of places were only distributing through distribution centers versus retail stores, and what used to be a job that was in the low teens as a starting pay started escalating up to the high teens, low 20s, as start, and that hasn’t changed. We did not pull back off of that after Covid, and so a lot of people are able, whereas maybe they had a lower paying job where they had that job plus a half job or two jobs, because the increase in pay, they were able to eliminate some of those positions, or maybe they had a family member that was also working that they were allowed to stay home now and build their family instead. So we started to see a lot of shifts in those ways, you know. We’re starting to come back, but there are still lots of challenges, and again, it’s only as good as the next disruption that could be local, it could be regional. Weather issues come into play. You’ve seen things happen in California in the last couple months that have not happened in a long time. I believe I heard about a tornado in Los Angeles last week. It’s something that, and I think that followed a blizzard or a snowstorm, maybe just a few weeks before that. There are things that are happening with the environment that are also causing disruptions, and that’s just in the United States alone, so if you look at more globally, there could be interruptions anywhere. Ukraine has caused interruptions in gas and energy supplies that have repercussions around the world, and cost increases that happen all over the place. There could be disruptions almost from any place. Being prepared to react to those disruptions is what’s critical to supply chain,

Maureen 6:42
you know. As you talk about finding alternate sourcing options, Columbus is the site of a new Intel plant, and so reshoring some of this manufacturing, and yet this is a years long process, multi year process. It’s a multi billion dollar investment on the part of Intel, so that this idea of we just find a second source isn’t as simple as I just pick up and go on Amazon and look for two manufacturers, depending on the complexity of my products, it could be multi year to address the production side, and that doesn’t address the labor side, which, to your point, seems like it’s structural. Many of the jobs we see, especially hard to staff, will likely be hard to staff long term.

Speaker 1 7:30
That’s correct. And you mentioned the multi year complexity of building out some redundancy or some onshoring. We saw that issue during Covid. A lot of people were looking for real estate, and either the real estate wasn’t there, it was snatched up. We saw Amazon take almost every available building in the US that they could. The complexities of having staffing to build real estate, we would do site searches for potential new opportunities, and literally we could go into an area and there might be three or four buildings available if that was in the whole market and if you didn’t jump on those buildings within a week it would change you know you would see that those buildings have been snatched up they had someone put their name on it there was definitely a shortage of opportunities for people to change their supply chain real time or jump into something that would help them immediately. So, now that we are out of COVID, we’re starting to see a couple of things. I think people added capacities ad hoc very quickly, and now they’re looking at that increased costs and kind of taking a step back with the possibility of a recession looming, or just increased costs overall. A lot of companies are feeling the brunt of that. You’re seeing that in corporate earnings right now. There has been some challenges. There’s challenges with excess stock. You know what happened is we had seasonal stock that was caught in a port, and the next season we brought it in around the poor, or it was prioritized all of a sudden. Now you’ve got a season’s worth of stock that you’ve got to sell through. And how do you do that? You do it by discounting, or you hold that inventory and pay the cost of that. A lot of companies are challenged with the cost increase they’ve had in those ways. They’re taking a step back and saying, well, do we really have a capacity problem? Seems like capacities are loosened up, maybe we don’t have a problem, but what they’re really not looking at is the reality that the next disruption should could put them right back where they were before. So, I think that there’s a lot of challenges in folks looking at where they’re at and trying to decide what’s my next move. In all of my conversations I’ve had with existing companies, potential customers is really about how do I plan for the next disruption, but how do I manage my costs as well. So that’s always going to be a complexity with supply chain. Unfortunately, what I do, we don’t make any money, we only cost money. Making sure that we lessen our costs and supply chain is important to the customer. I should say, important to our. Collaborators, the end customer, they don’t really care. They still want the end demand, good execution. They want their product. There’s a lot more visibility into the supply chain, the last mile supply chain. Customers still want better information, they want better delivery. We’ve been spoiled by the click the button and get it. Guilty of this myself, get it same day if you can get it, or at the worst next day, or two days. Customers still want that, you know, they’re ambivalent to the increased costs, unless we pass that on to the customer. Yeah, lots of complexities that are still driving either change, or the need for change, or the view that there should be change in the future.

Maureen 10:37
During the pandemic, I was buying some things on an online auction site. They were unique items, and periodically they just get lost. It was from like 100 miles away. It wasn’t coming from Europe or the Middle East or something. It was Cincinnati coming to Columbus. So I bought a couple hearings. Little tiny box didn’t make it from the auction site to the shipper, even things that for us as customers look pretty simple. Those little bits and pieces of things are complicated to ship.

Speaker 1 11:13
We could quote that delivery is 99.98% on time, and frankly, you don’t care. What you care about is your one little box that didn’t deliver, you know, that’s the reality of the customer these days, and that’s what my partner companies, or folks that are in this industry, that’s what we have to remember and be cognizant of, is that customer demand and the expectation for better communication, better information is not going to go away. It’s only going to enhance, you know, we talk about customer delight. I work for amazon.com very early in their existence. You know, one thing that we used to hear from Jeff Bezos is, does the customer care? You know, if we’re going to spend money on this, does the customer care? Does it enhance their ability to be delighted? Are there things that we’re doing to enhance their experience with us. I used to spend my Christmas days, my first two or three years with Amazon, opening presents with my children, and there were a handful of us that would head to the distribution center with the thought that a potential customer is going to get their first computer and they’re going to unpack that computer and set it up, and one of the first things they’re going to want to do is get into this newfangled online ordering thing, and they’re going to order something from amazon.com and when they ordered, our goal, you know, it was maybe a handful of shipments, or 20, or 30, or whatever the number may be, our goal was to get that product to a ship status within hours, because that customer would be so delighted that they would share that with all of their friends and relatives. I ordered something from amazon.com on Christmas Day, and it shipped that day. That’s the type of thing that we’re facing now in the industry, is that customers want to be delighted. They’re expecting being delighted now, you know the communication of what happens with your shipment. I just ordered a custom pair of Nike’s that were DHL colors. It’s actually very cool, and has DHL supply chain on the back of the shoe. The ordering process and the communication process was phenomenal. They let me know when it entered manufacturing, when it was done being manufactured. I got an email when it was shipped from China. I got an email when it hit the delivery truck. I got an email, you know. I was away from home at the time, and I was able to call my wife and say, ‘Hey, I just got a delivery of my brand new cool DHL Nike shoes. Can you go take them off the porch so that nobody will steal them? That’s the type of customer service that we are looking at now these days

Maureen 13:41
from a company perspective, DHL, as a company, or other companies that are engaging in supply chain, that means a significant investment in technology.

Speaker 1 13:51
You know, looking at digitalization and innovation, they’re the new realities. I am privileged to be involved in a number of innovation type experiences. Locust bots is a picking bot. We are at the forefront of using locust bots that I think DHL just recently eclipsed 100 million picks worldwide with these locust bots. Traditionally, a picker used to have to move from aisle to aisle to retrieve goods. They could walk, we’ll say eight miles in the course of their day, moving a heavy cart with heavy boxes on it. Now the robots actually do all the traveling, and the associate can be contained to a much smaller location where they see a bot dwell, and they walk up and pick, and the bot is carrying the heavy box. There’s no longer these large carts where associates might run into each other, or they might strain themselves by maneuvering these carts through a wide picking area. They could traverse 100,000 square feet time after time after time in the course of the day. Now it might be three or 400 foot aisles that they just have to watch to make sure that a bot that swelling gets a pick. We have things like exoskeletons that. People can wear that actually strengthens your movements, and it tells you how you’re lifting. It gives you feedback on whether you have the right support in your body, and whether your lifting activities are the right ones. It reduces your physical exertion. We have floor scrubbing bots that work autonomously. We’re currently piloting an autonomous unloader through Boston Dynamics, called Stretch. I think it’s a pretty industry-wide pilot, where you know we don’t have to have associates that are unloading in hot trucks in the middle of summer, or in very cold trucks in the middle of winter, or lifting boxes that weigh 3040 pounds from over their head, or picking it up from the floor. We have bots that are doing this now. You know, there’s just a number of other things that innovation is helping out what we call big data. There’s so many data points now, and things like predictive analytics that will help us to get the right product in the right quantity, the right place, to the right people at the right time. Recently was working with a customer on a collaborative project together, where the first thing we do is we ask for data from them. Back in the day, I don’t think that we could have gotten the type of data that we can get now. I literally got like 30 or 40 million lines of delivery and activity data that we can then analyze and help them come up with the right approach for their operations. You know, if you look at digitalization, if you look at big data innovation opportunities, there’s a lot that will help us in supply chain to help improve not just the customer experience, but the associate experience as well. One thing we have to remember about these innovation and technology pursuits is that we’re really at the infancy stage in these things. 20 years ago, we didn’t have these opportunities, you know, we were just talking 2025 years ago about e-commerce being the next big thing. 25 years ago, amazon.com only sold books, and now they’ve evolved into what can’t you find on Amazon, but now we’re actually talking about so many other things in our operation. I bet you we have at least 60 or 70 different types of individual things that we work on at DHL?

Maureen 17:04
It seems like that is going to help you, the end customers, and your clients build their resilience, even when labor forces are shifting. You will have the capacity to navigate more of the disruptions than you did in the past.

Speaker 1 17:22
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And on top of that, there’s always a thought that robotics or innovation is going to eliminate jobs. I have a use case in one of my operations where these locus bots actually, I would not say eliminated, or what we would say is replace jobs, but what happened was, we were able to repurpose those jobs, so instead of removing people from the operation, we were able to move them to other parts of the operation to increase capacity. We’re starting to see more of that. So, there is a study that I recently read that said automation will eliminate 85 million jobs by 2025 but the reality is it creates another 97 million new jobs, so we’re not really eliminating jobs, we’re just moving them around into whether it’s other industries or other areas of a building or supply chain. We’re starting to see that innovation enhances our work lives, but doesn’t necessarily replace the need for staffing. What it does is, I think, it helps to just create different types of jobs with new skills and new training needed. The feedback on locus bots, there’s an excitement level that comes with dealing with robots, you know. Instead of moving a box all day long, or just filling an order, I get to interact with this really cool bot, you know, I get to go home and tell my family that, hey, I’m working in robotics, I’m working on technologies that are really at the forefront, and this is really cool and interesting. I love to see that excitement level.

Maureen 18:51
I had a lot of fun the day that you demoed one of your robots for me. I hadn’t seen that before, and I don’t know if I expected it to look like something out of Avatar or what, but it was cool to see the bot come by, pick, move things around, and imagine a warehouse with a few 1000 of them. How efficient they must be in, like, they don’t crash into each other like humans do when they’re on their cell phones or something. They are sensing they’re spatially aware, they’re able to pick without dropping things, and they don’t get tired,

Speaker 1 19:23
they come to work on time, they don’t call out very often, but you know there are challenges, there’s a lot of testing and implementation and pilots, a lot of things that goes into making sure that these technologies work in a warehouse environment, they do add cost, you know, that’s one thing that, as we get further and further down the technology road, I believe that we will come down in cost, will increase in efficiency, will increase in productivity, but there’s a long way to go. Like I said, I believe technologies like this are in their infancy, especially in the supply chain space. I think manufacturing is a lot. Further down the road, you can go into I toured a BMW plant a few years ago, and it was just awe-inspiring to see the type of technologies, the type of robotics that were in there, building cars.

Maureen 20:12
It is interesting, as you mentioned this, because it raises some societal questions, not removing jobs, but shifting jobs. I’ve been playing around with Chat GPT, and it’s now become my coworker. There are things I can do much more efficiently that I just wouldn’t have done before. I would have just said that’s going to take too long, I’ll say no to that opportunity. So I actually get to say yes to opportunities, and I assume similarly in the warehousing space, if you can’t find employees, there are times you must say no, especially when adding shifts and working on weekends, and those kinds of things that you can deploy bots for longer hours, they don’t need breaks. It does take out some of the roles that humans often don’t want to do, or are less healthy for people to be working night shifts, and things like that.

Speaker 1 21:05
Now, it’s an expected – the world’s a much smaller place. There’s an expectation that we will do technologically advanced things. Being able to present that to a workforce that’s just coming out of school, or that’s developing and evolving, that’s getting into their own careers. It’s very important. Folks are looking for these types of opportunities, and if they don’t get them, they’re going to go find them where they are. So, it’s important for us to have opportunities for people to work with these types of technologies. This really is the future. Whereas, again, we’re in our infancy, we’re going to see the people that are coming up and getting into the workforce now, they’re going to grow up with these things, whereas we kind of grew up in the e-com age and saw that develop. They’re going to be able to tell these stories 2530 years from now, where they’ll say, “Hey, I remember back then when these robotics were primitive. Look at what’s happening now. You know, there’s talks about dark facilities where everything can be run by robotics, everything can be managed by those types of things that doesn’t take any kind of customer service out of the equation. More people will be able to serve the customers or program these bots or to analyze data that helps them make better business decisions overall. So, I think the horizon is very bright in that way.

Maureen 22:19
Where is artificial intelligence or machine learning coming in on that path? The

Speaker 1 22:25
horizon on machine learning is just as bright. AI is a hot topic right now. A lot of people coming out of schools are geared towards developing AI and machine learning. We talk about the fourth industrial revolution being on the cusp of that right now, the rapid changes in technologies and industries, the interconnectivity, smart automations, all of those things. We’re really at the beginning of those stages.

Maureen 22:49
We talk about Moore’s Law and how quickly technology evolves, and I’ve heard people saying it just can’t keep up, and now we’ve seen that we’ve cracked that barrier in some ways, of AI that is available to people like us, not to people in big research labs, and it does seem like we’re now going to hit another kind of sprint of these technologies being inserted into our daily lives, beyond my thermostat that knows when I’m home and when I’m not, or my doorbell that sends me a text if something happens in the neighborhood. Now it’s going to be every device it seems like in my life could be smarter than I am.

Speaker 1 23:29
Think about it. The first digital photo was taken 27 years ago, I think 1996 if I remember right. Think about that. They say that more pictures are taken every day than in like the first 100 years of photography, you know. It’s scary to think where we could be in 10 or 15 years. Some of the technologies that we have now, smart watches, none of this stuff is all that old. We tend to go through technologies like that. Look at Air flight, early 1900s first flight, but we were using planes for intercontinental travel and war by World War One. We were on the moon within 60 years of the first flight. So technologies these days were, we’re in the same way. Some of the reports that I read, talking about artificial intelligence and how to work on things like regenerating bodies or how to repair themselves, it’s just scary. What the opportunities and possibilities are.

Maureen 24:27
Yeah, you and I may never age beyond something a few years from now.

Speaker 1 24:31
Careful, don’t share anything beyond that.

Maureen 24:34
Yeah, I wasn’t sharing mine either, although people probably know by now. So, how does innovation come into play in modern supply chain? A

Speaker 1 24:44
number of ways. Again, I mentioned big data. We’re able to analyze things in a much different way. You know, I can look at consumer activity and consumer behaviors in a, in a much different way than I used to. Within the four walls of a building, I can look at. Activities that I never used to be able to see, just by running large datas and having the people that can analyze these things. One thing that we have these days that we never used to have is analysts buried within the leadership of each build, people that can look at data and make decisions on it, whether it’s where to put the inventory in an active location or in reserves, where to put the right amount of inventory to make sure that we’re able to get it out to the customer the quickest. The space that we’re working in with innovation that helps productivity, we’re able to be more productive, we’re able to better understand our people and engage with them in a different way. If you look at paperless, that may seem like a very simple thing, but the fact that I can now take a tablet, whereas I used to have a leader, a frontline leader, used to have to go to a computer and do a report or write a review or deal with an attendance issue, now I can actually have that leader take a tablet, and they have very comprehensive reports that they can get into and work side by side with people instead of getting isolated into an office to deal with things that is a significant change in the way that we used to do business. Getting closer to the associate, it’s just as important as getting close to the customer outside the building. There are things that technology has driven, I mean, even here we’re face to face on a video conference, you know, that’s something that was driven by Covid that helped get us closer together, just from an overall perspective of the world is smaller now, so there’s lots of innovations that I think are helping out in that way.

Maureen 26:38
How could supply chains protect themselves from future disruption,

Speaker 1 26:42
we’ll never be able to protect ourselves from disruptions. There’s going to be disruptions, that’s a fact. The biggest thing that supply chains need to look at is resilience. You know, how do we react to the disruption that’s facing us? Covid was the biggest disruption that I’ve ever been a part of. Obviously, it was global, and it impacted everything. Most of my buildings are ecom buildings. A lot of the retail sector shut down, physical stores shut down for a period. We were considered a critical source because supply chains had to keep running, even though you may not have had a product that was considered critical, you might have 100 containers at the port that were blocking other products that could be coming in, so supply chains had to keep running, our economies had to keep running, so ecom was the way to go in a lot of ways, we had to keep facilities running, so what we saw at the time, the disruptions were extreme, I had to do social distancing within a building. I couldn’t have people working within six feet of each other, and in a normal operation, I would have people that could be two or three feet away from each other. So now I had to put up plexiglass partitions in the break rooms. I could only have so many people in a break room at a time. I had to do deep cleaning in areas where there might be an infection, there were issues with getting people in the building. There was issues with getting staffing. We had to react pretty immediately. Resilience is the name of the game. The question is, what are we doing now to make sure that we’re mitigating in advance of those things happening? I see a lot of companies that are working towards multi sourcing, I’ve seen a lot of movements towards the coasts, or getting out of a single stream, where let’s say you had all of your operations in Columbus, Ohio, it’s where our headquarters is, so I’ll mention that one, but let’s say you had all your operations in Columbus, and a large tornado hit Columbus, it wiped out your ability to distribute your product, there needs to be some redundancy in other areas of the country. We’re starting to see moves towards that. Cyber security is a big disrupter that could potentially impact a lot of companies. You know, we see that all the time, where there’s somebody to get hit, gets hit with a cyber attack, and it can shut down their operations. It can impact them to the point where it could put them out of business. There are potential issues with small businesses going into bankruptcy or going out of business. So, single sourcing into suppliers is a big issue. Not only do you have to look at your tier one suppliers, but you’ve got to look at tier two and tier three to see how they’re set up and to make sure that they’ve got resiliency set up amongst their own suppliers, you know, not just your initial ones. Governance EFG issues are a big opportunity. There’s a lot of things that happen out in the world with social issues. Those can impact your company. You’ve got to make sure that you’re partnered the right way, that your suppliers are educated, and that you know what they’re doing when it comes to environmental social governance issues. There’s no excuse. If you’re partnered with someone who has an issue with any of those things in ESG, you’re going to be held accountable for it. So, making sure that you understand what they’re chasing after and making sure that they’re solid in their own ESG. People aren’t working on the next disruption now, they’re going to be behind. It’s coming. We just don’t know where. Yet,

Maureen 30:00
how do you prepare for something that you don’t know about?

Speaker 1 30:04
Asking the question about what could be next. We are aware of most of what could be a disruption. So, I’ll give you an example. We know that there’s unrest in China, especially when it comes to Taiwan. I would expect that people are looking to source out semiconductors to a different area of the world. If they’re not, they should be. DHL asks itself the same questions. We’re very advanced when it comes to cybersecurity. I get a number of emails a year that come to my email box at DHL, and it’s a ploy to see if I will click on the wrong thing by someone that’s phishing, I will tell you, I generally pass, I think I fail once in the last three years, it’s a way for us to say, hey, are you creating risk or are you not, the same thing with overall risks, we’ve got a broad, broad knowledge base at DHL, we’ve got 570,000 employees. We’ve got just so many people across the globe that work on mitigation issues. We collaborate with our partners to make sure that they’re looking at things the right way. We take a look at the potential risks and we build mitigators in place far ahead of when we need them.

Maureen 31:20
So, can you talk about why you’ve stayed and what you like about DHL?

Speaker 1 31:26
I will share a story that happened to me recently. I was at our annual conference in Cancun. I fell sick on the way down there. I actually ended up getting so sick that a couple days into the trip down there, I had to be taken by ambulance to the ICU, and spent three days in the hospital down there. I was on a couple of phone calls with our global head of security and our COO for North America, working on ways to make sure that I was taken care of financially. They require payment up front in Mexico. They don’t honor your insurance. These folks took the reins. They were ready to fly my wife down on the next available flight. They were ready to get me out of the country on a non-commercial flight if needed. I had someone who stayed with me at the hospital at all times. There were people checking up. I’ve got so many texts that I couldn’t answer them all, even now when I pop on a call with one of my peers or one of my partners, they want to know how, how I was and what happened then, and it’s times like that that it makes it a great place to work. It’s not just, well, we say that we’re a great place to work, but now we’re going to follow up on it, and it’s not just that, but it’s the dignity that I’m treated with every day. I will tell you, DHL is one of the least political organizations that I’ve ever worked for. You know, we’re all about execution, driving the basics, making sure that our customers are satisfied, and our customers are two-tiered. It’s really the partners that we work with, you know, we have 500 operations in the United States alone, and 40,000 associates. It’s not just those companies that we work with, but it’s really their customer. The activities that I see at DHL, everyone rowing in the same direction, and making sure that we’re all achieving the same goals. There is a common goal, and we’re very in tune with what those needs are, yet we treat people with dignity. We’re very big on equity and inclusion.

Maureen 33:29
It seems like DHL is attentive to environmental, social, and governance as a company.

Speaker 1 33:38
We’ll start out with diversity and inclusion, it’s the new normal. DHL embraces that we’re expected to honor that. If there are deviations, it’s addressed. Diversity is celebrated. You know, we see it all the time. I have a number of operations within my scope. We have a culture calendar. We have celebrations that we honor, whether it’s certain days that we celebrate. Black History Month is a month-long celebration that we embrace. I have some sessions with customers where we’ll have a quarterly business review, but part of our business review is some sort of community affairs thing that we do. We have a volunteer day coming up, where everyone is encouraged to volunteer for that day. You’re encouraged to do voluntary things throughout the year. When it comes to sustainability, we’ve made commitments to sustainability, where our goal by 2050 is to be net zero on emissions. We have targets that are set out for 2030 where we’re going to bring our tonnage on greenhouse gasses down from 39 million metric tons down to 29 million. We will have spent 7 billion euros on green technologies by 2030 We expect by 2030 to have 60% of our last mile deliveries done by electric. Vehicles, as far as sustainable aviation goes, we are going to increase our sustainable aviation fuel blend to over 30% by 2030 Carbon neutral buildings are important to us. Design 100% of our new buildings to be carbon neutral, and then we offer green alternatives for 100% of all our core products and solutions. That’s our goal. So, and then governance, we have a number of audits that we go through to make sure that we’re following what we say that we’re going to follow. Not only are we committing to doing these things, but we’re following up on the commitment and making sure that we’re governing the right way,

Maureen 35:32
and each of those seems to go hand in hand with building a more resilient organization.

Speaker 1 35:38
It makes it easy when there is an issue to grab a group of people that are all again rowing in the same direction and make sure that we collaborate together when there are issues, I, you know, when Covid hit and we had to figure out how to run buildings, we put policies in place so quickly, we went out and we got protective gear, the PPE that we needed to wear masks, and we ran out of hand sanitizer. We found ways to make our own. When Covid hit, we allowed people to take a Covid leave. You didn’t feel comfortable working, you could stay home and take care of your family and yourself, and you weren’t at risk of losing your job.

Maureen 36:14
What are you most excited about going forward in the next year?

Speaker 1 36:20
There is a tremendous amount of opportunity in supply chain. We’re out there running 60 plus different types of innovations in our buildings, and we’re testing that out. If you don’t have supply chain issues yet, think about some of the disruptions that you could face in the future. Help us to mitigate that. What excites me the most is that those opportunities that are out there, our growth pattern is just unbelievable to me. That’s what’s exciting supply chain overall. It’s exciting to see that it’s morphing and maturing into something that’s just such a viable opportunity. Think a lot of people, if you know, we probably fell into supply chain. I always thought I was going to be in construction. I loved building things, and I had zero talent for building things, so I sucked at it. So I ended up one day quitting a construction job and getting a job as a temp forklift driver, and I have built a career in progressive positions and getting into leadership and learning how to be a leader with some really good large companies, and I would say that the maturation process that’s gone into my leadership in the last eight years with DHL has just escalated exponentially. You know, some of the things that I’m involved in, it’s exciting to hear some of the things I’m able to do. The different departments that I work in, whether it’s IT, I work in inventory control on any given day, I deal a lot with innovation. I work in the business development field, I work in operations, I work in HR. There’s no day that’s the same. And we have a very robust intern program at DHL. I see a lot more programs in colleges where it’s a logistics professional program, and I think that there’s more that will be developed in the near future, we’re starting to mature in logistics. We need that talent. I mean, we’re so desperate for talent over the next few years. We need people that are coming out of school with some of the skills that we’re talking about, you know, innovation, the ability to analyze data. These young professionals coming out of school, it’s unbelievable the playground that they get if they come to a company like DHL or really any supply chain, supply chain overall is just phenomenal, and that’s what excites me the most, is being involved in a company like this.

Maureen 38:31
Mike, thank you for sharing your wisdom and experiences about what’s happened in the rear view mirror with COVID, and as we look forward, and to our listeners, thank you for joining the show. I trust that you’ve heard something about supply chain that will inform your business decisions as well.

Speaker 1 38:51
It’s been a pleasure, Maureen. Thanks for having me.

Maureen 38:53
So, Mike, one last question, where would people find out about you or DHL?

Speaker 1 38:59
You can find me on LinkedIn, Mike McClellan. I would direct you, if you do a search on DHL Delivered. A lot of the information that I talked about is right there. They have sections on globalization, digitalization, sustainability, e-commerce, with some very in-depth articles and data and information, dhl.com and search on delivered

Maureen 39:23
to our listeners. Please like us, share us, and follow us on LinkedIn, or you can follow me as well, Maureen Metcalf, on LinkedIn, and we post daily to share leadership insights to help you elevate yourself as a leader and run a more effective organization,

Speaker 2 39:58
hear that sounds like. Simple. No appointments. About 15 minutes to change your oil, then out the door and back to life. Valvoline instant oil change, simple.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai