Your trusted supplier is reporting a supply shortage of plastic for smartphone cases. Your stock must be short. The top managers suggest using raw materials from other manufacturers. A young Malaysian company is ready to deliver it in two months. The managers only briefly mention that the company is still setting up gas purification units for carbon dioxide (CO2) removal which usually takes up to six months to build.

The secretary forwarded to you a link to an investigative report on your African supplier that mines coltan for the electrolytic capacitors used in your smartphone boards. The article talks about child labor. The board of directors is confident that the fuss over the article will die down but insists on finding a new supplier. However, this will lower your margins.

There is a container crisis in China. There are not enough ISO containers to ship across the ocean. This coincided with a drop in jet fuel prices that allowed you to transport goods. However, to maintain the old logistics prices, planes have to be loaded to the brim.

The U.S. list of pollutants has lowered the limits of permitted emissions. This has obliged all industries to make additional upgrades to their cleaning systems. The U.S. government will bear most of the costs, but it will divert some human resources.

Your R&D department has presented a new technology to reduce the production cost of a communication module by reconfiguring it. The technology requires permission from the International Telecommunication Union. In order to comply with the “Recommendations on Human Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields”, you will have to conduct experiments on animals. You know for a fact that the phrase “No animal was harmed” does not apply to these experiments.

A scandal for the international transportation market. The press discovered that a major truck manufacturer, BeepTruck, installed a catalytic converter of insufficient quality in its diesel trucks and underreported the results of emissions tests. The scandal surrounds the Bigbob brand, which makes up the majority of your fleet. Many people are showing solidarity by abandoning the BeepTruck brand. Will you give up ground transportation for this year?

According to the World Wildlife Fund, overconsumption of resources for the ordinary delivery of goods causes forests to disappear, droughts to increase, water resources to be depleted, soil erosion to increase, biodiversity to decrease, and carbon dioxide to increase in the atmosphere. These factors have a direct impact on economic development and human well-being. Did you know that?

The BluePiece Foundation, organized by members of the Electrical Engineering Conference, has declared a year of environmental conservation. To reduce the environmental footprint, they offered market leaders funding to replace their diesel fleet with electric trucks. The largest suppliers of the product would be announced as those leaders. The smartphone market also fell into this category. The rich will become even richer.

The world is experiencing a growing trend toward private aviation. You can’t prohibit your top managers from buying private jets. You can use recyclable materials, encourage separation of waste, and increase the lifespan of products, but every dollar your company earns buzzes with the turbine of a new airbus.

There was a fire at a GreenPlastic production facility in China. It hit the electronics market hard. GreenPlastic is the only supplier of high-quality recycled plastic. It will take over a year to rebuild the plant with a production capacity of 60 tons of plastic per day. The market is on the hunt for leftover raw materials of the GreenPlastic brand and subsequent production with a reserve for the period of the plant reconstruction. Otherwise, they will have to lower the quality and environmental friendliness of their products.

Eco-activism is gaining momentum. The impact of corporations on nature is now reflected in sales. Buyers are more likely to choose brands that are less harmful to the environment.

The term “Black Swan,” coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, refers to hard-to-predict and rare events that have significant consequences. The lockdown of the entire planet has become such an event. With one wing, it has sent people to work remotely, and with the other, it has closed the borders. Not to mention other unfortunate consequences. It became a real challenge for managers of all stripes; a challenge never faced before.