At first, I found comfort in flying a row back from a priest. I needed all the help I could summon, given my flight was about a half-hour late in taking off and I was in serious jeopardy of missing my connection.

But the padre would not stop fidgeting, futile in his attempts to find comfort in his flowing black vestment and apparently either suffering neck or ear pain. The whole damn flight.

I knew I was screwed. And, alas, after a quarter-mile sprint from one concourse to the next, I was. Next flight, seven hours later.

To say it’s been a thing to get up to Alberta, Canada, would be an understatement. Let’s just say this is the latest chapter in a months-long effort. And watching my connector airplane, still just sitting there, dislodged only slightly from the jet bridge 1 minute after departure time, nearly deflated me enough to say to hell with it and hop on the next flight home.

There’s a job to be done, though, and so it’s time to stick it out. Time enough, and well more, for lunch. The flatbread looks damn good. I’ll order that.

Nope, says the server, they’re out of em. Well, not out of them. The oven is broken. And the part to fix the oven is “stuck on a f*#@in’ container ship.” A gentleman also wanting a flatbread happens to service boilers around the world, and relays that he’s waiting on a couple of pieces of equipment also stuck on a container ship in the Port of Savannah that won’t be delivered until June. The kicker: his customer resides a couple thousand yards from the ship.

I share, we all share, in this festering frustration. It’s just damn hard for people, for things, to get places these days. It is, after all, a global economy. And no matter where you are, in an airport, in a restaurant, or in a meatpacking plant’s shipping dock, we’re all in this together.

Getting there, or getting it there, takes cooperation and the right partnerships. In the current environment of supply chain lags, you need good partners — or need to be the good partner — who can provide almost a one-stop-shop experience with multiple services that help simplify points A to B and the costs in time and money. You need partners with understanding and patience.

While you’re waiting, you might have time to fine-tune your processes, by way of investment in automation, data management and the people who make it all run, to control costs. There may be opportunity yet in this new environment, where being “on time,” though the definition has changed, provides a competitive advantage.

My boiler guy says, for example, that a helicopter service in Atlanta has capitalized on the stalled container ships off the nearby coast and is flying and fetching cargo — so long as that cargo is on the top of the heap and attainable.

Current times and the future is filled with ifs. It’s full of difficulty and dilemmas. At some level, the bigger you grow, the bigger the risk. All costs are up. It takes optimized systems and controls to manage them and capture margins. It takes a balance of physical capital capacity and the talent of your human capital. It takes moving people into positions where they can leverage your technology and unlock more opportunities. It takes providing such opportunities to keep those people engaged enough to maintain a viable and productive capacity.

It is, as I find again and again, all about people. It is the people you know. It is an understanding of what their needs are and what your mutual needs are, and a mutual respect to make sure both are met. It’s an understanding, maybe more so, of who you are and what it takes to get the job done.

The man of God on my airplane may not have helped my cause as I'd hoped. But still I have faith that I’ll get to my destination, once and for all, and the experience will have been worth it.

Getting there

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