I spent the last couple of days in Lisbon. I had been
invited to go back to Portugal to deliver a lecture about the logistics of aid
projects at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
I ended up by focussing the audience’s attention on the
support required by emergency operations, large-scale humanitarian assistance
and peacekeeping. These are the civilian areas where logistics are major
challenges. Aid projects are now more and more focussed on soft matters, like
good governance, and they call for little logistical support.
And I also told them that a good logistician needs to
develop a rhinoceros hide. A very deep skin indeed. My experience has shown
that when everything is going smoothly, nobody says that the chief logistician
is an excellent professional. As soon as something goes wrong, like a generator
that stops abruptly or the fuel that runs low, everyone starts blaming the
incompetence of the logistics fellows.
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