Supply Chain Lessons From An Obituary

Supply chain lessons from the obituary of Paul A. Strassmann who had “a diverse career spanning from WWII resistance fighter to IT roles in major corporations."

May 19, 2025

I like to read the obituaries in the newspaper, especially the ones in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Most of the people featured are unknown to the general public, or at least to me, but they accomplished great things in life despite dealing, in many cases, with great obstacles or challenges early on.

Take Paul A. Strassmann, for example. I had never heard of him, but according to a profile by James R. Hagerty in this weekend’s WSJ, Stassmann had “a diverse career spanning from WWII resistance fighter to IT roles in major corporations [such as General Foods, Kraft, and Xerox]. Stassmann critiqued wasteful tech spending, advocating for aligning IT investments with reorganized business processes for efficiency…[He also] emphasized practical tech use over chasing trends.”

Strassmann died on April 4 at the age of 96. I encourage you to read the full article for more details about his personal and professional lives — including how during World World II, at the age of 15, “he fled into the woods, in the direction of gunfire, with the aim of joining resistance fighters [against the Nazis] known as partisans.”

But here is the excerpt from the article that prompted me to write this post:

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