Surveys are snapshots. They don't tell you what respondents were thinking a year earlier, or a day later. They offer up opinions that are frozen in time.

So the Chinese are gearing up to sell their branded merchandise in the U.S. But what about the other way around? Can American manufacturers capture a healthy share of China's burgeoning consumer market?

Chinese brands are aiming for a hefty slice of the U.S. consumer market. And they're liable to succeed a lot more quickly than you might think.

With every crisis comes opportunity. The Great Recession, which choked off access to capital and placed suppliers around the world in economic jeopardy, triggered the growth of supply-chain finance programs, benefiting suppliers and buyers alike.

Movie heists often involve sophisticated tools and brilliant plans that depend on crack timing in order to succeed. Not so in real life.

More than 30 years ago, when I began writing about transportation and logistics, one of the first pieces that I did was about the imminent demise of the U.S. merchant marine. Today, I find myself addressing the same issue. As industries go, this has got to be one of the slowest deaths on record.

The nation's transportation infrastructure is in dire shape.

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.