Optimization technology allows manufacturing companies to become more flexible and to more efficiently manage their supply chains by accounting for real life constraints and business rules. They can review "what-if" analyses of various scenarios, tied to key performance indicators that measure success on an ongoing basis. They can generate near optimal plans from the virtually infinite number of possible options. And with a clear set of future-oriented KPIs they can measure tomorrow’s performance before it happens.

The semiconductor and electronics industries have learned in the most difficult manner in the past few years how damaging business disruptions due to weather can be.

There's a custom in Washington that U.S. defense contractors don't talk trash about their competitors, at least not in public. After fiercely competing for multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts, the winner often placates the loser with a piece of the action. When Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract to build the F-22 fighter jet, it hired Northrop Grumman to build the plane's radar. Boeing won the contract to build the Air Force's KC-46 tanker plane and asked Northrop and Raytheon to contribute key components. Everyone ends up happy. It's how it’s always been done.

"There are some horrible working conditions; kids as young as seven making surgical instruments; people losing limbs. It's horrendous," says Mahmoud Bhutta, consultant surgeon and founder of the British Medical Association's (BMA) Medical Fair and Ethical Trade Group, established in 2007. "Many of the companies [which supply the NHS] have been burying their heads in the sand."

Jon Gordon, author of Energy Bus and other books on leadership, shares a host of ideas on how leaders can recharge, refocus and reenergize to stay on top of their game.

When DWT tanker Shoko Maru caught on fire recently it was described as one of the worst accidents in energy shipping in the past decade. And a recent study shows that product tankers are considered the most accident-prone shipping types, followed by LPG tankers.