About This Episode

The episode opens with a signal from Dean that on the surface looks like a new sports fixture but is really about industrial power: the humanoid robot games in Beijing, where over 600 teams and 2,000 robots competed - including one that ran the 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt. But looking beyond what the robots can do, the question is why this event happened in Beijing. China hasn’t simply built impressive robots; it has built the supplier ecosystems, the skills networks, and the manufacturing infrastructure to move from prototype to production at scale. Is that the real signal about where industrial capability is moving?

Graeme’s signal is what he calls “the unsexy stuff of change” - the slow-moving layers of the world that we don’t expect to shift quickly, and so don’t plan for when they do. Drawing on Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers model - from fast-moving fashion and commerce down through infrastructure, governance, culture, and the natural environment - he argues that we are now living in a moment where all six layers are changing simultaneously, with no steady state in the foreseeable future. The Straits of Hormuz is exhibit A: a critical global waterway that barely registered in most boardrooms until it suddenly wasn’t.

Our guest this month is Paul Noël, Chairman of Achilles US & Canada, bringing thirty years of experience in procurement, supply chain technology, and business transformation. Paul’s perspective is that of someone who has watched organisations cycle through waves of optimisation without ever quite solving the fundamental tension: the more you outsource, the more risk you move off your balance sheet and into your blind spots. The conversation uncovers where US businesses are most exposed right now, why vertical integration is making a quiet comeback, how data centres have become a perfect microcosm of every modern supply chain challenge, and the three questions Paul would put to any CEO to find out whether their supply chain is genuinely resilient - or just lucky.