As you read the following case study of Under Armour’s supply chain division, keep in mind how the unit’s experiences managing different product pipelines across various functional groups was improved through the use of an effective operating rhythm.
In particular, note how this functional group of the organization was being repeatedly surprised by X1-type events that would emerge across different silos, how its leadership had historically pushed solutions through solid-line channels, and how that approach was losing effectiveness as the company’s rapid growth and success brought with it new levels of complexity.
Consider how different forums, each structured to meet specific ends, were created. Note how key actors from the relevant functional groups were brought into this new cycle and how that shift improved the organization’s reaction time to X2. Additionally, take in how behavioral norms and relationships among these siloed teams began to shift as a result of this new approach.
“Wow . . . well—it’s like being parachuted into a tropical jungle . . . with no compass . . . or GPS . . . or any bearings . . . and then being asked to find your way out of there.”
So answers the corporate officer when he is asked to summarize the challenges of managing a global supply chain—a function he helps fill for a multibillion-dollar company whose logistics have had to adapt to the organization’s external complexity. As the chief of staff for its chief supply chain officer—Jim Hardy—this source has borne close witness to how this entrepreneurial company has had to adapt its traditional culture and ethos in the face of success and subsequent growth.
They both work for Under Armour, a sports apparel firm recognized around the world today—and its efficient logistical operations are an example of the practice of operating rhythm being used to great effect.
The company’s sizable status in its field belies its humble roots. It all began in 1996 when Kevin Plank, a fullback for the University of Maryland’s football team and the self-described “sweatiest guy on the field,” found himself repeatedly forced to play in soaked T-shirts—a result of their clingy cotton fabric. Frustrated, Plank conversely noticed that under the same conditions his compression shorts always stayed dry, no matter how much of a sweat he managed to work up on the field.
Thus inspired, Plank started a business manufacturing breathable-fabric athletic undershirts. Starting out by distributing prototypes to his friends on Maryland’s varsity teams, he would see it grow to a multibillion-dollar organization.
But as the company grew into the enterprise it is today, its people retained an entrepreneurial, athletically derived spirit intertwined with its initial success. The company’s equivalent to the Task Force’s aligning narrative remained strong, even after its dramatic internal and external transformation: in its 2010 10-K filing, Under Armour announced that it had passed the billion-dollar net revenue mark for the first time in its history, having increased net revenue 24 percent over the previous year’s figure. But the tone the company used in announcing this milestone was not one of boastful adulation or fulfillment. It was one of hunger: “We are 14 years into this thing,” the report reads, “. . . and it feels like we are just getting started.”
Even after the firm’s growth, Plank’s initial entrepreneurial emphasis on improvisation and grit—the need to find a way—held in the company. Teams and leaders within Under Armour still felt like they were a part of Under Armour’s original start-up story and acted in accordance with it, often inventing spontaneous, ad hoc responses to their problem sets—which, when combined with the newly global scale of the company, brought both advantages and leadership challenges, which were most apparent to a select few.
Kip Fulks was one of these. The cofounder of Under Armour, Fulks is a high-energy being who was a two-time All American lacrosse player at Maryland while Plank was on the university’s football team. He was one of the early samplers of Plank’s undershirt prototypes and has been with the company since day one—eventually serving as Under Armour’s chief operating officer, to whom Hardy reported as the chief supply chain officer. Fulks’s strategic-level perspective at the top of Under Armour’s bureaucratic lattice, at the head of various information highways, made its teams’ lack of operational interconnectivity clear to him.
I first met Fulks in 2014, when he and another Under Armour executive attended a leadership forum in Alexandria, Virginia. Hosted by the McChrystal Group, it was designed to assemble leaders from various backgrounds for a daylong discussion about the challenges of contemporary organizational leadership.
After a long opening conversation, we all took a brief break from the confines of our conference room setting. We drove to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a run, and Fulks and I took off on it together. Passing Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, and the White House, we talked about the earlier discussions of the day.
I wasn’t familiar with the nuances of Under Armour’s business at the time and had no awareness of the pressures the company’s supply chain division was coming under. But I tried to use my experiences in the Task Force in answering Fulks’s questions, which started to come quickly: How did your units synchronize timelines across silos? What role did senior leadership take in helping that happen? How did you push ownership of decisions onto younger leaders? On and on, running the whole time, I was both being asked about my experiences and educated about Under Armour’s state.
We finally started a slow recovery walk up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Fulks looked over at me and spoke. “Look, Under Armour’s awesome,” he said. “We’ve got good products, people, all the things we used to dream about when we started. And we’re still super aggressive, which is awesome but can sometimes be a problem, now that we’re getting bigger and scaling up is harder. Our ethos is to find a way, and our teams all take that to heart.
“We’re solid. But getting our teams to stay synced and communicate while each finds a way is getting challenging,” he continued. “Come to Baltimore when you can, and we can talk it through further.”
A few weeks later, on an early Chesapeake morning, I pulled up to Under Armour’s harborside headquarters. A repurposed Procter & Gamble soap-manufacturing facility, the campus’s redbrick buildings were still emblazoned with names like “Dial” and “Ivory,” marking these products’ past points of manufacture. By 6:00 a.m., employees had already filled the property’s waterfront athletic field. Looking on, I watched as a crowd of them completed group fitness classes, flipped tractor tires, and worked out with in-house personal trainers.
By midmorning I found myself going back and forth on a whiteboard with Fulks as we talked through the state of Under Armour’s logistics. “I hate consultants,” he said, opening our discussion with a laugh. “Don’t take that the wrong way, but I hate paying someone to tell me what I already know. I need to know that your team can help us actually solve something.”
I couldn’t argue with that—it’s a common viewpoint—and I appreciated his direct nature. We settled on a middle ground. Fulks would give me a few weeks to spend time with his teams, attend meetings, and get a general sense of how their operations ran. “Then,” he said, “come back to this whiteboard and explain how you think your model can help. We can both decide from there if it makes sense.”
A few weeks later we were back in that office, facing a whiteboard. Much as Fulks had said early on, the various stakeholder elements in Under Armour’s supply chain division apparently needed synchronization. Also in the room was retired U.S. Army general Billy Don Farris, who would work on-site with these teams for the following year.
With all of us present, I owned up to how hard this issue would be to change. “There’s no magic button to solve this immediately. It’s about leadership. Your senior folks will need to drive this.”
Fulks smiled. He was fine with that.
So what exactly were the symptoms being presented among Fulks’s subordinate teams? As Under Armour had grown, introduced increasingly diverse types of product, and entered unfamiliar markets, its pseudo–aligning narrative, find a way, gradually proved to be insufficient to guide appropriate, scalable responses to the complex problem sets that percolated through the company’s teams.
Nowhere was this more clear than within the company’s supply chain division. This functional group of the firm, according to a senior source within it, is unique in that it is “affected by every aspect of the organization: from design concept, all the way to grabbing that piece of apparel, or footwear, or accessory off the shelf and going up to the cash register.” Its silo was a unique bridge among the peer product design, marketing, customer service, and sales divisions and was thus subject to the shortfalls and miscommunications among these.
The status quo of the early 2010s in the supply chain division—a period marked by record conventional financial success for the broader company—has been described by some as being riddled with “stove-piped” communications and a “lack of visibility” among these peer divisions. None of them was necessarily at fault; the organization’s structure had simply become a victim of its own exponential growth.
Denny Ward, a younger member of the supply chain team who currently works in more senior levels of product sourcing, has a clear memory of the former downstream and upstream interdependency weaknesses of these different functional groups. “Our Supply Chain logic is that we will go place POs [product orders] at factories to service those buys. . . . Then, as the factory is accepting that order, they’ll provide visibility in terms of what they can hit . . . and then, through the likes of production, they will give updated dates, in terms of any delays that they’re working through.” These distinctly negative X1-type events were often held up by “timing and lack of visibility” among necessary functional groups.
Sometimes, though, these sudden developments were potentially positive—for example, as Ward puts it, “if product is selling extremely well—better than planned—often we’d have to react to that market trend by creating a slightly newer, different design.” But one thing was consistent among negative and positive environmental changes: “Time is of the essence.”
A critical metric long used to evaluate the success of Hardy’s division was the ability to meet the “buy-ready date” for products—the deadline by which the technical specifications, or “techpacks,” of product orders had to be delivered to manufacturers. Yet whenever unexpected problems did arise from peer divisions—like delays in design specifics or an issue with product quality or a need for new products (X1)—they took too long to emerge and were dealt with too late, often in non-scalable ways (X2). These “bottom-of-the-ninth,” last-ditch scrambles to hit buy-ready dates were common and highly frustrating to the teams involved, which all too often fell short. They were, indeed, “finding a way,” but it wasn’t enough—which was especially galling and clear to Hardy’s more tactical teams.
Hardy—an experienced logistician from the consumer goods industry—could only look on as Under Armour’s buy-readys “kept on slipping past” due to steadily increasing bureaucratic disconnects among the supply chain division and other silos. Each slip was limited in its consequences, but in total the problem was costing the company dearly. Strict deadlines became flexible guidelines, but whenever Hardy would raise these issues with his higher-ups, the reply given to him was that he “couldn’t control for those variables.”
Yet as logistics-related problems and delays associated with meeting buy-readys became more and more complex, Hardy found himself personally bogged down in resolving them for junior-level subordinates in his solid-line bureaucracy—reducing his bandwidth for dealing with strategic-level considerations for the division.
The forms that X1 events took were becoming more complex over time, exacerbated by corporate growth. As put by Peter Gilmore, an Under Armour officer who has floated between product design and other divisions of the company, “four years ago, we couldn’t make a Black Tech tee, our number-one-selling SKU, in more than one location.” This was a reality shaped by Under Armour’s historical focus on the North American market, but now the demands of international markets had started to outstrip the existing model, which had begun to rely heavily on “bottom-of-the-ninth” responses in line with having to “find a way.” It was a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.
And so at the center of supply chain’s challenge was a need to overhaul what Hardy thought of as the “cadence and communication” issues that would implicate any divisions involved with Under Armour’s supply chain.
Hardy uses a powerful metric to summarize the scale of this problem supply chain faced just a few years ago, and how effective and critical the eventual changes in their operating rhythm were to solving it. “In 2012,” he commented, “we were a one-billion-dollar company . . . that was servicing our customers at a 50 percent on-time rate. Today we’re a five-billion-dollar company, servicing our customers with at least an 85 percent on-time rate.”
But this didn’t happen from pure luck. To achieve this, a few steps would need to be implemented simultaneously—the most important of which was a new operating rhythm.
Under Armour’s supply chain division would implement not only a series of O&I-esque forums but also set a cadence on which they would be synchronized with one another—as well as a separate, unique one for clarifying the decision-making rights of tactical leaders and teams.
After we first met in 2014, Fulks returned to Under Armour’s headquarters with what Hardy later described as “a thirty-page binder” that summarized the Task Force’s reinvention and how its teams had been networked. Fulks chose to issue this reading material to the various solid-line leaders who reported to him in Under Armour’s bureaucracy and asking them to think through “what this approach would look like” if they were to apply it to their teams—implicitly sending a signal to Hardy that reform propositions were welcome and had the critical strategic endorsement needed to succeed.
It wasn’t as though Hardy hadn’t tried to create a “shared consciousness”–esque space among his teams already—although he hadn’t referred to it by this term before. The supply chain had long held a gathering among themselves every Friday called the “war room,” during which informal but in-depth information exchanges would take place among various members of the supply chain teams.
These had actually begun under previous iterations of the supply chain and were invented during a previous period of upstream/downstream crisis in the company between 2012 and 2013. Ward remembers this as follows: “[That initial War Room] went on for about six to eight months when we were at crisis mode.” Once that passed, there was a recognition of the need for a regular briefing of “outlining the game plan of what needs to be executed, cross-functionally, with a few different partners.” Representatives from across the functional group’s leadership tiers would gather on a conference call where Hardy and his teams could discuss emerging problems from around their global arena of operations.
These War Rooms were certainly forums—very much in the spirit of the Task Force’s O&I—but they operated on a far smaller, informal scale and lacked video feeds of presenters. Ward remembers these as simple setups that occurred “on the fourth floor of our Cascade building. . . . We kind of grabbed the conference room in the back corner, where no one ever had meetings.” They were small and physical presence–centric, and informal to the point that their “locations jumped around a bit.” Nevertheless, these War Rooms were structured around key briefers, created space for discussion of issues, and encouraged off-forum networking.
Ward voices a real fondness for the informality of these stages of the War Room, wherein a small, clustered group of representatives could “print out their slides” and get together under their own power when needed. For these early iterations of War Rooms, pressing issues of note would be addressed through a mix of qualitative and quantitative dialogue, and their progress would be charted by “a red, yellow, green stoplight approach.”
But the limitation of these early forums was the scale of shared consciousness that could emerge from each forum—whereas attendees of these forums did share close bonds with one another, the lack of formality changed over time as new needs of Under Armour’s supply chain division were addressed. Other divisions impacted the company’s logistical operations and had key perspectives on external and internal developments that would impact the supply chain’s ability to hit buy-readys, but they and their senior decision makers were nevertheless absent from the first generation of War Room forums. Naturally, the absence of these senior voices from other divisions that were implicated in the supply chain’s operation easily created conditions for distrust and raised the potential for finger-pointing among these elements down the road.
Hardy read through the binder Fulks provided “from cover to cover” and saw a chance to fully optimize Under Armour’s now-global supply chain—a goal he’d been pursuing for “three and a half years, by that point.” Writing in the binder’s page margins, he returned it to Fulks with a plan for how Under Armour could finally create communication and cooperation across its different functional groups, at which its supply chain was the heart.
The regular use of War Rooms wasn’t abandoned—they remained a helpful tool by which individuals within Under Armour’s supply chain division could exchange best practices with one another. But in order to provide truly cross-functional information sharing and collaboration, a similar space was needed to achieve the same end state for all functional groups whose near-term decisions had longer-term impacts on the supply chain.
This new forum, one that could be expanded to include members from design, marketing, and sales, became known as “Win at the Shelf.” Its purpose, recalls Hardy, was to ensure “right product, right place, right time, right cost.” Simple goals, clearly stated; but attaining them would depend on the inclusion of other silos, as ensured by Fulks’s strategic-level endorsement—and the mutual need to find a way.
Between the continued use of War Rooms and the gradual introduction of Win at the Shelf forums, Under Armour’s teams would have regularly timed spaces for the creation of shared consciousness and establishment of empowered execution, on a set cadence. War Rooms would continue to be hosted every Friday, and Win at the Shelf forums would take place every Wednesday. War Rooms would last sixty minutes, and Win at the Shelf forums would be strictly held at two hours—accounting for the increased participation and discussion expected from this latter forum.
So how was this cadence determined?
Hardy’s ideal end result was a series of proactive and transparent dotted-line networks across the company’s different silos that could forecast issues well in advance of their manifesting as costly impacts on the supply chain—and thus move as fast as possible in relation to the change in Under Armour’s external environment. Hardy needed to balance this with a respect for each division’s particular cadence of operation and market complexities—and so a weekly cadence was set, as a compromise between the speed of external environment change and the interests of the desired participants.
Hardy’s chief of staff was the designated controller for Win at the Shelf forums and thus was ultimately responsible for managing dialogue in them and ensuring that the forums themselves were designed to provoke the right behavior among participants. Instructions issued at the beginning of every forum relisted the rules for participation and, critically, set the conditions by which empowered execution would occur “off-line” outside these spaces. Prime among these were directives like:
Hardy’s chief of staff also took the time to carefully divide the forums by subject matter—every Win at the Shelf would include not only explanations of recent decisions made by different teams, Regional Updates, and “6 Month Rolling Calendar Highlights” but also a section set aside for designated “Special Topics”: issues of particular merit or scale that were deemed worthy of discussion across the multiple divisions represented.
Not surprisingly, it started up slowly—Hardy’s chief of staff remembers sitting down with Farris in front of Under Armour’s org chart and “identifying all of the key leaders from different parts of the organization,” with the intention of extending an invitation to some of their teams to participate. Slowly these invitations were accepted, and participants from product design and sales teams joined over time. This was a joint result of Fulks’s solid-line influence and perseverance on the part of Hardy’s staff.
As the discussions in these forums among functional silos picked up, so too did transparency and honest exchanges among them—not always to positive effect. Strong personalities and interpersonal residue from disputes long past meant that some negative behavioral norms had to be worked through. Hardy recalls one discussion in a Win at the Shelf over a missed buy-ready date resulting from a previously undisclosed holdup in another functional group. Addressing the presenter, and with his patience severely tested, Hardy barked, “When are you guys going to stop being [expletive] surprised by deadlines?”
After that forum concluded, he took the time to reflect with Farris on this testy exchange. “I really kicked that guy’s ass, huh?” Farris nodded. “Yeah, sure you did—but keep winning battles like that, and you’ll lose the war. How transparent do you think other participants are going to be, after watching you blow up on that guy for being honest with a problem his team is having?”
Hardy took the lesson to heart. Building forums is one thing; exemplifying the right behavior within those forums is another, and it must be done, lest the wrong behaviors become communalized across functional groups.
But these behavioral hang-ups eventually were worked out, and transparency led to understanding: in Hardy’s words, he gradually developed “not quite sympathy, but empathy” for the internal processes and stresses of his peers across these different silos. These slow reconciliations, tempered by patience and non-emotional accountability, helped foster truly meaningful discussions within these forums, ultimately driving the creation of shared consciousness for those involved.
Yet if Under Armour’s supply chain division was to be better integrated, it was going to happen not through the forums themselves but rather through the networking of teams outside them. The critical question was how to balance the strategic awareness created in these spaces with similar ones for action, through networks of teams.
Hardy’s chief of staff, as discussed, ensured that the briefings provided in each Win at the Shelf forum emphasized that “participants were expected to network with each other,” so agendas were structured accordingly. Gradually, networking began to happen not just as a result of dialogue occurring within the forums but also by cooperative off-line behavior—the eventual results of which are detailed in the “Outcome” section below.
At the same time, there were certain issues that these networks of teams couldn’t resolve for themselves. Their space for empowered execution was encouraged and respected, but some problems remained too complex or strategically relevant for cross-functional networks to execute upon on their own.
As a result, in order to complement the space provided for empowered execution, Hardy created “decision-making forums.” Set to occur every Thursday, the supply chain’s decision-making forums allowed for the division’s teams to present especially time-sensitive challenges or disputes they’d recently encountered and didn’t feel empowered to solve.
Yet there was a clear danger in establishing spaces for Hardy to continue making decisions on behalf of the supply chain’s tactical-level teams. Using a decision-making forum might take away from the ability of these lower-level individuals to exercise empowered execution—defeating the purpose of the supply chain’s reformation. But the supply chain’s leadership were made aware of this threat and today describe the decision-making forum as a means not to exert greater control over decisions in Under Armour’s logistical teams, but rather to reinforce the types of decisions that lower-level leaders are empowered to solve themselves through their network.
A senior officer in the supply chain says that the benefits of the decision-making forum were multiple: not only was his boss’s bandwidth increased by establishing a normalized cadence for highest-level decisions, but also “for the VPs and SVPs that reported to Hardy, they felt empowered and began to understand which decisions had to be owned by them. It made everything else more efficient.”
The positive change in Under Armour’s supply chain division had several contributing factors, all of which were derived from the practice of various forums and the spacing of them through an operating rhythm. The ability of the supply chain to meet buy-readys and react to sudden crises improved due to better communication across silos; lower-level teams and leaders gaining a greater grasp of the decentralized decision making expected of them; and the provision of a new structure by which Under Armour’s organizational ethos could be expanded.
The tangible, quantifiable evidence for this improvement rested in the change in Under Armour’s buy-ready metrics. Hardy is quick to rattle off the improvement Under Armour has seen in its ability to deliver techpacks on time—and the “50 percent to 85 percent” figure might well be one of his favorites.
But it is the qualitative personal testimony of members of the supply chain division that may resonate the most. “I can’t remember the last buy-ready debate [the supply chain] had” with product teams, Hardy says, noting that the improved “accountability and awareness” among different functional groups on the importance of achieving these numbers has given the organization a common purpose to achieve. “It’s treated as a deadline.” Hardy’s chief of staff corroborates this change in expectations, noting that these regular periods of vertical communication created “a level of accountability we hadn’t been used to.”
This was augmented by a perceptible recognition among supply chain’s operational and tactical teams of what behavior was expected of them during phases of empowered execution.
Hardy remembers watching this develop as follows: “In the old days, people would bring data to forums, but then they’d wait on someone else to make the decision. People like me.” As a solid-line leader, Hardy had historically controlled all of the decision-making authority in Under Armour’s supply chain division—even though the War Room had been a fixture among his teams, their lack of connections to other functional silos meant they leaned on him to make decisions or communicate across Under Armour’s org chart.
Creating a new space for inter-silo shared consciousness in Win at the Shelf forums, communicating in them the need for decentralized decision-making, and further clarifying which decisions had to be owned in decision-making forums, Hardy noticed a gradual change take place. “Indexing what happened back then to today, junior people are now bringing their decisions to the War Room and Win at the Shelfs, to make sure folks understand the decision they’ve made and the implications of that for others.”
At the same time, his decision-making forum became increasingly cleared up—the results of networks forming, solving problems proactively, and describing what they’d done, not presenting data and asking for permission.
So Hardy started getting his time back. Similar to the experience of directors at OMES, Hardy found his days less crowded with resolving tactical issues and making decisions for his teams. Through forums like the War Room, Win at the Shelf, and the decision-making forum, the scale and expectations for the empowerment of teams and junior leaders were constantly reiterated, allowing them to own these decisions, rather than overload Hardy as an information pump. From correcting an IT system issue within a new distribution center in Canada to setting up a third-party logistics agreement in Korea in record time, this empowerment has seen numerous instances of paying off operationally.
Nevertheless, a question implied by these practices was whether this set operating rhythm in Under Armour’s supply chain division would fly in the face of Under Armour’s long-standing pseudo–aligning narrative—“find a way.” This common creed, core to the organization’s identity, emphasized the value of entrepreneurship and creative, improvised solutions above all things—and its widespread acceptance had long allowed the company to rapidly invade new markets and aggressively overthrow competitors since those early days in Baltimore. If a disciplined operating rhythm ran counter to these principles, then the potential for narrative and cultural conflict would be heightened.
Gilmore hasn’t seen these risks manifest. In fact, he believes using a well-balanced method of creating forums allowed the opposite to occur. “I think this help[ed] scale what Under Armour’s all about—Under Armour can’t continue to operate the way it has so successfully in the past as the ten-billion-dollar global company it will be soon.” Rather than limit, formalize, and strictly define how the supply chain teams might be able to work, the thoughtful implementation of forums according to an operating rhythm has, in Gilmore’s eyes, provided a lattice to expand the organization’s ability to act upon the original ethos—in effect, the aligning narrative—of its founder.
“We’re very different from other places I’ve seen,” Gilmore continues, “and a lot of our competitors have cultures where it’s more about one superstar than the team—but Under Armour has always been a very blue-collar place, and it still is. People aren’t associates; they’re teammates. Meetings don’t exist, but now huddles do.”
Its supply chain division has demonstrated a greater ability to scale this aligning narrative and provide a stronger structure across participants to War Room, Win at the Shelf, and decision-making forums. They were scaling more than process—they were scaling culture and narrative, multiple times a week, across globally dispersed teams.
These factors have combined to inform supply chain’s capability to rapidly react to unexpected crises when they inevitably arise and increase the ability of supply chain to hit buy-ready deadlines for its stakeholders—there have been a number of documented instances where a new development in supply chain’s environment is identified (X1) and acted upon (X2) at a far greater rate than would have been possible under the previous, bureaucratic system.
One favorite story involves a “pinnacle product” that was found to have issues with fit and performance when it had already reached an extremely late stage in its manufacturing process and inventory was already beginning to be built. Supply chain’s response was to “bring it up at the next Win at the Shelf forum,” says the source. “And with all of the key leaders being there, we were able to take immediate action on that issue. We were able to execute on the strategy created through the forum within a week. In the past it would have taken a couple of weeks to make decisions about a response [to this crisis].”
In a similar instance, in early-to-mid-2015, the Port of Los Angeles—among the largest commercial ports in the world, handling nearly 180 million tons of cargo that fiscal year—was racked by a large-scale labor strike that effectively shut it down for the foreseeable future. For Under Armour and the broader apparel industry, this was a true disaster, as a great deal of their product bound for the North American market would be delayed indefinitely.
Under Armour’s teams had little advance notice of the strike. They knew that some critical contracts were about to expire and that the labor negotiations were not going well, so they prepared to react autonomously should things at the L.A. port be disrupted. In short order, the team reconfigured major portions of Under Armour’s global logistics pipeline to be routed through Vancouver, New Jersey, and New York, softening the blow of the strike and impressing their customers with levels of adaptability that did not go unnoticed. The bottom-line result of this response? “Millions of dollars saved,” estimates Hardy, while other major competitors were seemingly stuck with the realities of the strike.
Under Armour has since come up against fresh challenges, as is the norm for any growing enterprise. As of early 2017, Wall Street analysts and external onlookers were openly noting that the firm had misread market trends and was struggling to maintain a connection with its core consumer demographic. But Under Armour is a natural underdog, dangerous when cornered. It has faced challenges throughout its existence, and if anything has proven true, it’s that the company’s constant drive to find a way has surprised the market more than once.
And throughout any recent rough seas, supply chain’s operating rhythm and discipline to the mission have allowed its teams to consistently meet Hardy’s simply stated goal of “right product, right place, right cost, right time.”
Much as the Task Force experienced on the battlefield, a unified team with a disciplined approach to communication and decision making can prevail through the fog of war and demonstrate a resilience that few competitors can match.