Vivek Sood

Managing Director - Global Supply Chain GroupMBA, LLM, CFALet me include a couple of brief biographical paragraphs that will hopefully spur you on to read my books with your full attention to get the best use out of them.If you have read my other writings these might have already signaled to you that I see myself as an outsider. I do not have a Bachelor’s degree, and really started my college education at the age of 29 - both facts helped me succeed immensely in life. At the age of 17 years, straight out of a boarding school in Northern India I joined a merchant marine company as a deck cadet after a brief training. My first assignment was to go to a shipyard in Japan and work with the ship's Captain, Chief Engineer and other officers to take delivery of a brand new ship being built there. At this time, due to the severe depression in the global shipping industry I saw many super tankers, worth several millions of dollars, sailing on their maiden voyage straight from the shipyard to the demolition yard. It was like seeing a baby being killed at its birth. It aroused in me an intense desire to study the causes of economic cycles - I had already seen the effects. Over the next 3 years - as I circumnavigated the globe multiple times on ships working 12-16 hours a day 6-7 days a week - I spent all my spare time reading voraciously about the economics, finance and modern commerce. I kept my day job for another 7 years because it afforded me the luxury of working with ports, harbours, stevedores, logistics companies, commodity producers and traders, importers, exporters and various other wheelers and dealers around the world, while earning a good living - enough to put some money aside for what I then considered a proper education. I travelled to more than 100 countries during these 11 years, rose in rank from a cadet to a Master Mariner with progressively more responsibility and a wider perspective, and saw thousands of different ways of doing similar things in all the different places I visited and worked in. Curiously, all of these ways had some practices worth emulating and others worth discarding. In my spare time I added another pursuit to my economic study - combining various ways of doing things to come up with the most suitable way for the circumstance in question. These two pursuits had already become my twin passions long before I studies for my MBA at one of the best business schools in Australia and took a job as a management consultant with a highly regarded global top-tier consulting company. For the last 15 years I have been a management consultant to the CEOs, boards and top executives in Asia, Australia and other places. I have focused on empowering corporations on 5 continents to achieve their peak potential – in operations, in strategy, and in all components of their entire supply chains. In January 2000, I co-founded and managed Global Supply Chain Group, a high impact services company made up of supply chain pioneers and thought leaders who work only on selected high impact strategy projects with some of the largest corporations in the world. I travel 60% of my time around the world for a single passion – creating, configuring, and formulating effective, secure and sustainable supply chains.