International Women's Day 2012

A greeting on the eighth of March.

An observation from someone who thinks about logistics for a living. Every year, for about seventy-two hours, an enormous quantity of cut flowers appears on every street corner in every Ukrainian city, and then vanishes.

That is a supply chain. Tulips grown in the Netherlands, cut, graded, packed, flown or trucked across Europe, cleared through customs, distributed to thousands of informal sellers, and sold at the point of maximum demand within a window measured in hours. Cold chain throughout. No margin for a delay.

It works every year and nobody thinks about it. I think about it, because I know what it takes to land a machine on a site on a promised date, and this is considerably harder.

To all the women marking today: a good day, and my thanks.