Today’s class started with one of the most thought-provoking exercises so far. A case study about a company that finds out one of its suppliers is using child labor, with workers as young as eight to twelve. Instead of just looking at it from one side, we had to analyze the situation from four different angles. First, what would be the worst way a company could respond? Second, what would the ideal response look like? Third, if anything were possible, what would the best solution be? And finally, how would the response change if money were infinite? Looking at all four sides made us be more honest and thoughtful than just searching for a single right answer. It showed how much context, resources, and intent shape the way companies handle crises. After that, the lecture moved on to supply chain strategy, especially the importance of diversification. The main point was simple, companies that spread out their suppliers and production across different places can handle disruptions better. If there’s only one weak spot in the supply chain, problems can spread quickly. But businesses with flexible networks usually recover faster and with less damage. To put this idea into practice, each group gave a short presentation about a real company dealing with a real crisis. My group looked at Apple and imagined a major earthquake damaging chip factories in Taiwan. For Apple’s immediate response, we suggested they should focus on sending the remaining chips to their best-selling products and start working with other manufacturers to fill the gap. Looking further ahead, a big disruption like this could push Apple to rethink and improve how they get their chips, making their supply chain stronger than before. Sometimes, a crisis can actually help companies become more resilient.
Lunch was served in three courses, offering a diverse selection. The meal began with pumpkin soup, which was okay, it just wasn’t my thing. The shrimp and pasta dish was an improvement, well-prepared and tasted similar to food from back home. The final course, steak with cheese sauce, was unexpectedly accompanied by two fried eggs and sausage. This combination proved to be the highlight of the meal. The experience served as a reminder that expectations and reality often diverge, contributing to the enjoyment of new experiences.
Our site visit today took us to Dien Quang, a Vietnamese electronics manufacturer specializing in lighting products. There were some translation challenges along the way that made a few parts of the presentation harder to follow, but the visit was worthwhile and genuinely informative about the company’s operations and what it does. Looking at their product lineup, I was struck by how familiar a lot of it felt. Many of their lighting solutions were comparable to products I have seen on shelves in the United States, a subtle but interesting sign of how globally aligned certain manufacturing standards have become. One demonstration that stood out was a hands-on illustration of how dramatically lighting can shift a space’s mood and perception. The guides showed how different lighting conditions changed the way a cut of meat looked, affecting its apparent freshness and color, and then did the same with mannequins, showing how similar figures could read completely differently depending on the light around it. It is the kind of thing you intellectually know but rarely see so clearly demonstrated, and it gave me a new appreciation for how deliberately companies in retail and hospitality think about light as a design tool.
The Q&A session at the end of the visit produced the moment I will be thinking about the longest. When someone in our group asked about the competitive landscape Dien Quang operates in, the company’s representative offered a surprising answer. Before 2018, he explained, there were only around five significant players in their space. Today, that number sits between 300 and 500 competitors. That is an extraordinary shift in a short span of time. What struck me even more than the number, though, was his response to it. Rather than framing the conversation around how Dien Quang plans to beat those competitors, he spoke about the company’s focus on building the best products they possibly can. He also mentioned that they have, at times, helped out direct competitors when the situation called for it. That answer circled me back to the question I asked yesterday in my blog. How can small and medium-sized businesses implement sustainable practices without the capital to overhaul what they already do? I did not expect to find a piece of the answer at a lighting company, but there it was. Businesses focusing on self-improvement rather than purely on outcompeting each other, and occasionally lifting up those around them, could be one low-cost path toward broader sustainability. Whether that philosophy could realistically take root in the United States, with its intensely competitive market culture, is a fair question and probably a complicated one. But the idea itself is worth taking seriously, and I want to keep turning it over as this trip continues.