Supply chain - a career switch path?

"Supply chain management" is a term you hear a lot now with globalized and outsourced production. It's a new buzzword.

This seems to split the interdisciplinary seam between engineering and business. It might show up in systems engineering, engineering management, or logistics.

Supply chain management has become a big issue with the H1N1 flu vaccine. It's hard to get it right now! Producing H1N1 vaccine has run into problems, but distributing it may be the supply chain weak link.

Like a lot of vaccines, it needs to be carefully refrigerated from production to injection, in a "cold chain" with a managed chain of custody showing that it's been kept in the correct temperature range. It can't get too warm or too cold - there are reports of thousands of hard-to-produce doses being lost.

See http://www.wptv.com/mostpopular/story/Vaccine-ruined/jXS5Vw6cmk6CG6quQ9opBw.cspx

(What kind of equipment and skills would this take? There are medical-grade refrigerators and freezers. Do you also need medical-grade truck drivers and medical-grade custodians and building guards?)

Here's one school that suggests supply chain management as a career switch path:
http://www.umsl.edu/divisions/business/mbaonline/phd/overview.htm

More on Life Coaching - podcast

Interesting interview of one David Wood on Michael Senoff's Hard to Find Seminars website:
http://find.hardtofindseminars.com/category/experts/david-wood/.

Actually, the interview was pretty hard to find on that website, too. I found it through iTunes searching against "coach".

The audio was also pretty marginal. If Michael Senoff wants attract people to those podcasts, he should invest a bit in improving that.

David Wood also has a visually appealing website at http://www.life-coaching-resource.com/.

With an unregulated, not heavily-credentialed, subjectively evaluated field, there's a lot of potential for fraud in life coaching, so I don't know if this guy was on the level or not. But he gave at least one interesting response to a question: What is the difference between psychotherapy and life coaching? Answer: Psychotherapy is like getting someone with broken legs to where they can walk. Life coaching is like getting a person who can walk to where they can run a four-minute mile.

So David Wood thinks the two are related. An obvious corollary, which they never pursued, would be that a person with some background in psychotherapy should be off to a good start if they wanted to consider life coaching. They did claim that "psychotherapists" generally need a license, whereas "life coaches" generally don't in most or all US states.

In fact, as mentioned in earlier posts, "psychotherapists" generally don't need a license either.

David Wood did mention that there were now university programs in life coaching. That's a new one - it will have to be the subject of a later post.

Jargon alert: something that seemed to come up a lot on the Senoff website was "HMA" consulting. HMA stands for Hidden Marketing Asset. Hadn't heard that one before today.