To be a corporate I.T. professional today, you have to be obsessed with cybersecurity. A line on your resume should read "paranoid tendencies." Because somebody really is out to get you - or, at least, your company's proprietary information.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the continuing efforts of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to reduce, if not eliminate, the use of independent owner-operators in port drayage operations. But that's just one of several major issues affecting truckers today. Here are some more:

"New business reality." That's an apt way to describe the position of any company that has just emerged from four years of reorganization under Chapter 11 of U.S. bankruptcy law. And it's precisely the challenge that Delphi Automotive faced back in 2009, when it sought to reinvent itself and shore up relations with an army of suppliers.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month drove two more nails into the coffin of port efforts to impose local rules on drayage operators, in violation of interstate commerce law. The court ruled unanimously that the Port of Los Angeles could not require drayage companies to display placards on their trucks that included a phone number for reporting concerns about their operations. It also could not mandate the development of off-street parking plans for harbor vehicles.

Hamish Brewer, chief executive officer of JDA Software, was giving a speech at the Economic Club of Phoenix last year, when the topic of global inventory levels came up. The question he posed: How much stuff is currently in transit or socked away in warehouses the world over? The answer: Nobody really knows.

It's been more than three years since the Obama Administration launched its National Export Initiative (NEI), with much ballyhoo. The stated goal of the massive effort was to double U.S. exports within five years - from $1.57tr in 2009 to a projected $3.14tn in 2015.

Eight p.m. in the "war room" of Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems: 150 people from all over the world are on a conference call. The topic is a supply outage of trocars, a medical device used in microscopic surgery. Someone on the line, clearly untroubled by the crisis, speaks up. "It's just a trocar," he says.

As manufacturers consider shifting production from China back to the West, the U.S. could become an economically viable alternative faster than you think.

On March 25, 1911, fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City. One hundred and forty-six garment workers perished in the blaze, many of them trapped in the building because management had locked the exit doors. The youngest of the victims were 14. It was a horrifying tragedy, not atypical of working conditions during the so-called Progressive Era. Can we not, however, take comfort in knowing that those times are far behind us?

The fog is beginning to clear. High-tech and other types of manufacturers are getting a better idea of what they must do in order to conform to new requirements for disclosing the presence in their products of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighboring states. Still, a number of questions remain unanswered.