Introduction
It’s an old joke, and not very funny anymore. “Will the last person to leave (fill in name of city) please turn out the lights?” We’re not picking on Flint for the sake of beating up on the downtrodden, but Flint is an exemplar – the poster child – for communities in economic death throes. Goodnight and Goodbye, by the way, has no connection with the Jonas Brothers’ song.
The dynamics of community collapse are complex; Flint has been dying for well over twenty-five years. But, at the core, the issue is that Flint is irrelevant to global automotive supply chains, and that’s the death knell. Hey, Flint is irrelevant to domestic automotive supply chains. It may even be irrelevant to the General Motors supply chain.
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Bruce Strahan is a Partners in The Progress Group, Inc., an international supply chain and logistics consulting firm headquartered in Atlanta. He lead the Supply Chain and Manufacturing practice groups for TPG. Bruce did his graduate work at Georgia Tech, and was previously a Manager in Coopers & Lybrand’s SysteCon division. He may be reached at
770-804-9920 or bstrahan@theprogressgroup.com
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