There’s a telling moment in how today’s top supply chain operators talk about their jobs. They don’t describe a string of emergencies. They describe a permanent state of emergency, and the subtle exhaustion of having normalized it.
“Tariffs change every 10 minutes, component costs, memory costs,” said Brittany Bagley, the executive who serves as both COO and CFO at Axon, the body camera and public safety technology company whose hardware ships to law enforcement agencies across the country. “There’s just sort of one thing after the next, and then your business doesn’t slow down, either.”
That sentiment, voiced at the Fortune COO Summit, was echoed by Jackie Zhu, Senior Vice President and North America Supply Chain Officer at Schneider Electric, the French energy management and industrial automation giant with a sprawling North American manufacturing and logistics footprint. Together, the two executives offered a rare, candid look at what it actually feels like to run global supply chains in an era of compounding disruption, from tariff whiplash and memory chip shortages to geopolitical conflict and demand shocks that arrive without warning.
The hidden labor of ‘looking easy’
What’s easy to miss from the outside is how much invisible work goes into maintaining the appearance of normalcy. Companies that have successfully weathered the chaos often look, to customers, to shareholders, and all like nothing happened.
But for Bagley, that’s often by design.
“A lot of times the supply chain team makes it look easy,” Bagley said. “But there’s just so much more work and effort going in behind the scenes. There’s a real load in the organization to make it look as smooth as it looks.”
Zhu, who oversees supply chain operations for Schneider’s North American business—which has seen explosive, sometimes unpredictable growth driven by demand for AI infrastructure and energy systems—put a finer point on the structural shift. Before 2019, she said, most of the disruptions were isolated cases. “Nowadays, it’s really the systematic, meaning the impact really cross all the chain from sourcing to manufacturing to logistics, as well the delivery to customers.”
The people running these systems haven’t just adapted. They’ve quietly redefined what “running” the supply chain means.
The new job description
Where supply chain used to be an optimization function — reduce cost, improve speed, tighten inventory—it’s now something closer to institutionalized crisis management. Dual-sourced suppliers, redundant facilities, real-time tariff flow analysis, scenario planning desks: these are the new fixed costs of doing business globally.
“We cannot change the policy at the end of the day,” Zhu said. “What we can do is really quick-adapt and quick-react to it.” Schneider now runs real-time footprint modeling—dynamically rerouting trade flows away from high-tariff paths when policy shifts, sometimes overnight.
Bagley described Axon’s evolution bluntly: the company used to build supply chains for lowest cost. Now it builds them for flexibility—even when flexibility is more expensive. That includes absorbing a jarring spike in memory chip prices, which have risen 4x to 6x in recent months, squeezing hardware manufacturers across the tech industry. “The investment to have it be flexible and resilient,” she said, “is absolutely worth it.”
What keeps them going
Ask supply chain executives what sustains them through the grind and the answers turn unexpectedly human.
Zhu recalled a moment during COVID when his team broke its own allocation rules to prioritize a small German manufacturer—one that turned out to be producing the automated lines that made cancer treatment drugs. A few hundred dollars’ worth of Schneider components. Millions in equipment and cancer patients were waiting.
“This company is producing the most sophisticated advanced automatic product line for the medicine, treating the cancers. So they have kind of one product line, cost millions, sitting there because they’re missing some of the product from Schneider, cost maybe hundreds of bucks, right?”
“At that time we decided that It’s not a matter of money,” Zhu said. “It’s a matter of life and death.”
The customer became one of Schneider’s most loyal, Zhu said, and that is where you can find durability in this turbulent business: “The supply chain operation team,” Zhu said, “can really win customer loyalty, not just on cost or delivery. Real loyalty.”
