Max HenryFounder & Executive Director, Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC) · Founder & Executive Director at Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC)

Ambidextrous Leadership: Balancing All Your KPIs #shorts

3 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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1:15

In this short, the speaker— a supply‑chain leader at Danone— explains that supply‑chain managers can never focus on a single performance dimension. They must simultaneously consider service levels, inventory, profit‑and‑loss outcomes, customer satisfaction surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, and ESG (environmental, social, governance) KPIs. Danone calls the required approach “ambidextrous leadership,” meaning leaders must find solutions that satisfy all these objectives at once. The speaker notes that this is achieved through multi‑constraint optimization in the company’s planning systems, which evaluate many constraints and select the solution that best supports the full set of KPIs.

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I, being in supply chain, I don't think we ever had an option to say, I'm only going to support service and I'm going to ignore inventory. Have we ever had the luxury of following only one dimension? And I think— Yeah. It's even worse because we're supposed to take the optimal decisions from perspective, not only of P&L, inventory, You know, satisfaction of customer, not even service, but satisfaction. We have surveys of customers, we have surveys of our people. And on top of that, we also need to follow the ESG KPIs. So the way— so the phrase that we're using in Danone, it's called ambidextrous leadership, which is finding solutions where you do both, where you do everything. You need to find— it's like optimizers we're running in our planning systems. You need to take multiple constraints and you need to pick the situation or the solution that is best in supporting all of your KPIs.