As technology has evolved at a rapid pace, so have operating environments, leading the most successful organizations to get better at anticipating change. Data is more abundant than ever, signals arrive faster, and leaders have more visibility than ever into what’s happening across their businesses.
How quickly organizations can act on that information, however, is a greater challenge.
At a recent Operational Innovation Network summit at Columbia Business School, hosted by the Deming Center for Operational Innovation and Excellence, that question anchored a series of discussions among leaders, practitioners, and academics. Panelists representing a wide array of industries from retail fashion and consumer goods to healthcare and meal kits, shared insights on how organizations can be best structured to respond to change.
Balancing Standardization with Real-World Complexity
For Kreg Koford, Senior Vice President of Operations at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), the challenge of adapting at speed is incredibly complex.
Healthcare systems, he explained, are often highly fragmented, with different parts of the organization operating independently. At MSK, research, hospital care, and education functions historically developed their own processes, creating inefficiencies and slowing the organization’s ability to act as a unified system.
At the same time, not all parts of the organization can—or should—be standardized. “The further you get away from the operating room, the easier it is to standardize,” Koford said. “As you get closer to the patient, there’s lots more preference.”
In practice, this means that while administrative and support functions can be aligned more easily, clinical environments require flexibility to account for physician expertise and patient-specific needs.
Koford was accompanied on the panel by Jenna Kirschner ‘20, Chief of Staff to the COO at HelloFresh. She shared insights into how the global meal-kit leader is staying nimble with its operating model through evolutions in both customer demand and international supply chains.
In this way, adapting at speed requires identifying where consistency creates value and where variation is essential and building systems that can accommodate both.
Designing for Resilience
Deirdre Quinn, co-founder and CEO of Lafayette 148, believes that adapting at speed has been less about formal restructuring and more about building resilience and elevating quality.
Over nearly three decades, her company has navigated supply chain disruptions, shifting consumer behavior, and economic shocks by maintaining tight control over its operations. During a panel discussion led by David Niles ‘98, Co-Founder and CEO of Council Advisors and current Chair of the Advisory Board of the Deming Center, Quinn highlighted that her business’s vertically integrated model—uncommon in fashion—has allowed it to respond quickly to changing conditions while sustaining the craftsmanship and quality that define the brand.
“Speed is the game for our industry,” Quinn said. “The fact that we could turn production so quickly… that was our strength.”
That flexibility proved critical during periods of disruption, when the company could adjust production volumes, manage inventory internally, and avoid relying on external partners who might not be able to move as quickly.
For Quinn, resilience is baked into her operating model and extends beyond the supply chain. Over time, the company has diversified its distribution model, shifting from a mostly wholesale distribution model to include direct to consumer channels, allowing clients to engage with the brand in the way that best suits them.
Scaling Agility
Niles observed that Quinn and Ruiz, though operating in very different industries, were describing the same underlying capability: the ability to redesign operations faster than conditions change.
As Chief Supply Chain Officer at Church & Dwight, Ruiz is working across a global network of products, suppliers, and markets where resilience is driven by intentional design. When Trump-imposed tariffs impacted goods manufactured by his company, Ruiz quickly evaluated the impact and decided not to pass the $150 million cost increase to retailers or consumers. Instead, the company was able to act quickly and decisively, stopping manufacturing of certain products within a couple of weeks, even as other companies were trying to ramp production back up.
While the tariffs still had some impact on the company’s supply chain, Church & Dwight was able to create value with their contract manufacturers to overcome these costs, resulting in an overall positive outcome. Specifically, they optimized costs by understanding consumption patterns and demand signals, allowing them to properly size manufacturing capacity and distribution networks to meet demand efficiently.
Ruiz’s approach reflects a broader shift in how large organizations are thinking about their supply chains. Rather than optimizing solely for cost and efficiency, Ruiz is building in redundancy and ensuring the business can continue operating even when disruptions occur.
That flexibility comes with tradeoffs. Maintaining multiple suppliers can reduce economies of scale and increase complexity. It also requires more coordination across regions and partners.
“A rule that I'm pushing really hard is that we need to build to adapt, not build to last. We used to buy very expensive lines that ran economies of scale faster. Today, in certain products, you need economies of repetition and technology that adapts,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz believes those tradeoffs are increasingly necessary. As a company expands globally, its supply chain must withstand disruptions while adapting to different market needs, whether that means shifting production across regions or tailoring products to local demand.
Taken together, the discussions pointed to a common thread. Across healthcare, fashion, consumer goods, and global trade, the organisations adapting fastest are the ones redesigning how they work, not just what they do. As Niles noted in closing, the leaders making progress share a willingness to treat their operating model as something to be continuously rebuilt.
The Great Reallocation
While much of the discussion focused on how individual organizations are adapting, Professor Davin Chor of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business offered a broad perspective on how supply chains are evolving at a global level. What he and his co-researchers describe as the “great reallocation” is already well underway.
“We called it a great reallocation, Chor said. “At the time, we included the adjective ‘looming.’ Now we can drop that — it’s no longer looming.”
Drawing on detailed U.S. trade data, Chor’s research showed that while imports from China have declined significantly, overall globalization has not reversed. Instead, supply chains are being reconfigured rather than dismantled.
"We are seeing U.S. decoupling from China, but this decoupling is specific to China. U.S. imports from the rest of the world continued to rise," Chor said.
Much of that shift has flowed to a relatively stable group of countries—particularly Mexico, Vietnam, and Taiwan—rather than to entirely new trade partners. As Chor’s research shows, the change is less about diversification into new regions and more about redistribution within an existing network.
Perhaps most notably, the pace of change has accelerated. Following the most recent round of tariff announcements, companies reacted far more quickly than they had in earlier phases of the trade war.
“The reaction was much quicker. Firms had already searched out and planned alternative sourcing arrangements that could be activated at short notice,” Chor said.
AI Is Doing More Than Just Automating Work
Emory University Professor William Schmidt’s research focused on how organizations will need to rethink work itself as AI becomes more embedded in operations.
“We want to understand how people are going to be using AI in their work, not how their work currently can be replaced by AI,” Schmidt said.
That means automation doesn’t eliminate effort so much as redistribute it—creating new tasks, new coordination needs, and new dependencies between people and systems.
That dynamic becomes especially clear when looking at how AI affects skill development. In one recent experiment, Schmidt and his colleagues found that participants using AI tools performed better early on but struggled when promoted to more complex tasks.
While AI can improve short-term performance, Schmidt argued, it may also weaken the development of foundational skills if used too heavily in early stages of work. He also emphasized that many organizations are approaching AI adoption the wrong way by treating it as a tool to slot into existing processes rather than an opportunity to rethink those processes entirely.
That transformation, however, is unlikely to happen overnight. As Schmidt noted, most organizations are still in an experimental phase, figuring out how to integrate AI effectively into their workflows. For that reason, the true value of AI won’t come from automating individual tasks, but from redesigning how work is structured around it and from ensuring that people continue to build the skills needed to operate in that new environment.
