I’m delighted to announce that Building a Sustainable Supply Chain, my second DōShort eBook/short book, goes on sale this week. If you haven’t come across DōShorts before, the idea is to give readers a 90 minute high-impact read on critical sustainability issues.

And what could be more critical than the supply chain? It’s where much, if not most, of the impact of your organisation lies, you have only indirect control of those impacts, you often have precious little visibility and, if an issue blows up in the supply chain, it is the big brand at the top that gets it in the neck either through reputational damage or soaring costs.

What I have set out to do in BASS-C is to show how building a sustainable supply chain requires going way beyond the plethora of frameworks that have sprung up to embed sustainability in purchasing decision making, and link it to strategic business planning – corporate philosophy, business model, product design etc. After all it is those functions that determine the shape of the supply chain.

To get some fresh case studies and perspectives, I carried out a number of interviews with leading sustainability practitioners, extracts of which I’ve been posting up here on the blog over the last few weeks (there’s a couple more in the pipeline). As usual these uncovered some real gems, worth the cover price alone.

Here’s the five pieces of advice with which I conclude the book:

• Make sure you are dealing with the big issues in your supply chain – nobody will thank you for tinkering around the edges;
• Be ambitious. Incremental targets lead only to incremental improvements; stretch targets lead to breakthrough solutions;
• You won’t solve these problems on your own: bring everybody concerned with an issue on board, get them thinking in the right direction and ask for their help in generating solutions;
• Be prepared to get tough. If a supplier won’t play ball, find another supplier;
• Relish the challenge. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. Perseverance is the key to success.

Do you need to know more? Then what you need to do is sign up to The Low Carbon Agenda, as on Thursday readers will get a smorgasbord of extracts, offers and insights.