Mr. Supply Chain, Daniel Stanton, Part 1

In this episode, I talk with Mr. Supply Chain, Daniel Stanton. He was all over national news during the Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020. If you recognize the term "the bullwhip effect" and you aren't in supply chain management, it's because you saw him speak with Tucker Carlson, or someone like that.

Daniel Stanton and I had lunch together almost every single day during my senior year. Those days were filled with conversations about string theory and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, late nights in his basement playing Arlo Guthrie on his guitar and he has a child that was born one day before my daughter. In this interview, I really felt our old friendship show up. 

Our lives took entirely different turns. I thought I would graduate high school and go into mechanical and aeronautical engineering. I didn’t. I took a series of customer service jobs and fell into Recruiting.

Daniel went into the Navy, then through a series of colleges, degrees, certificates, a master’s from MIT, and became a very public expert in Supply Chain Management where he wound up recreating much of the recruiting process for an international industrial equipment company.

I love that Daniel has varied experience, and in a company that might be perceived as having a certain culture, he pivoted and brought in people with more varied skills. I spoke a while back about the career pyramid that Gen Y is capitalizing on. I have to say, Daniel was early to this pyramid game, did it before it was recognized as a thing. The base of his pyramid is broad and he has been able to relate his experience to other areas of business.

The two of us have experienced plenty of hard knocks, we've invested in lots of education, and our beliefs and careers have largely done the same thing. His on much larger scale than mine. But, as you hear in this episode, we still share similar philosophies on most things, especially when it come to recruiting.