word play
NEW!
by Kevin Fahy
Unchained Melody I have often thought it funny when world events make us all feel as if we have suddenly become experts on topics that until recently we had never even heard of. Over the past two years, for example, I’ve heard people debating the merits of monoclonal antibodies, messenger RNA, herd immunity, etc., as if they were participants in an epidemiology seminar. At recent holiday dinner tables, the talk seemed to have turned from virology to logistics (which is probably a good sign in itself). For veterans of the toy industry, the term “supply chain” was quite familiar, but for most people it was every bit as mysterious as the “spike protein.” For the uninitiated, a supply chain is simply the network of companies and organizations that provide goods and services to a given business, making it possible for that business to produce whatever it produces. Most chains have grown much longer over the years, and have more links than you might think. Back in the days of the robber barons and the great monopolies, conglomerates often sought to control every step of their process from start to finish. They owned the farms and mines and forests where raw materials were obtained, they owned the railroads, the factories and the retail outlets. They bought out their suppliers (and their competitors). You might expect that model to be more efficient than our current situation, but it is actually the reverse. By breaking the process down into all its component parts, and bidding out each part, a company can produce better products, and deliver them more quickly and less expensively. Take publishing, for example. A hundred years ago, it was not unusual for a publisher of books or magazines to print its own products, but over the course of time printers and publishers gradually decoupled. By the time I entered the industry in 1976, newspapers were about the only publishers that commonly owned printing presses, for obvious reasons. As it happened, however, my employer was one of the throwbacks, a publisher of books, magazines and various teaching aids that was housed in the same building as a printing company. I worked in the editorial department upstairs, while the ground floor was mostly devoted to machinery. It would seem as though there would be advantages to such an arrangement, but it never seemed to work out that way. Every printing company is efficient only to the extent that a given publication fits the presses and other equipment that it has. If a product is the wrong size, color, print run, binding or whatever, then the cost is out of line. Since we didn’t have the option of printing somewhere else, we ended up simply paying too much. Years later, when I got involved with founding a publishing business myself, one of the things I was careful to avoid was a too-close relationship with a printer, let alone ownership. We deal with a number of printers and constantly evaluate others, based not only on price, but also on quality, turnaround time, flexibility, customer service, etc. A similar process has happened on the editorial side. We are much more likely to engage freelance writers, artists, photographers, and so forth than we were in the old days. When you add in all the other contractors that every business needs, like tech people, legal services, accountants, and so on, you
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