Willy C. Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, likes to talk about solutions. He is an expert in manufacturing, supply chains and intellectual property rights. He serves on the board of Flex, one of the world’s biggest contract manufacturers. And since China is a manufacturing giant, he spends a lot of time there, visiting the country’s major companies and trying to understand their manufacturing operations and supply chains. On his coffee table at Harvard is Marc Levinson’s book, "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger," a book he highly recommends. What follows is a lightly edited Q. and A.
Willy ShihIllustration by Lauren Crow
Q: For the past month, we’ve seen a huge disruption of supply chains tied to the global pandemic. Given your expertise, are we learning anything new about the structure of our global networks?
A: What we are going through on global supply chains is really quite rem
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