Home Depot has opened an 800,000-square-foot Dallas distribution center where flatbed trucks can drive through and load up on heavy items including lumber, roofing materials and pipes. The facility, which was designed with Home Depot's professional customers in mind, can load up to 75 trucks daily and make deliveries to customers within a 75-mile radius of the city, and the home improvement retailer has plans for more of the facilities in other markets.

Distributors must ask themselves what makes their job opportunities attractive and how people benefit from working at their companies, writes Bridget McCrea. It's particularly important to minimize negative views of manual labor and tailor recruitment of women, McCrea writes.

Bond, a shipping startup, is trying to increase online shopping sustainability, decrease customer annoyance and save companies money by using small distribution centers in urban neighborhoods. By delivering large quantities to the centers via trucks at night, when roads are clear, and using cargo tricycles for last-mile deliveries, the company is cutting carbon emissions and delivery time.

Business-to-business buyers have moved to digital channels for purchases, with 72% planning to spend more online in 2020 than last year, according to a Digital Commerce 360 survey. Many online B2B buyers are repeat customers and order at least monthly, if not more frequently.

Address the competition during sales meetings by building up your own company instead of knocking others down, writes Sean McPheat. Focus on how your products or services are different from competitors' and what expertise you offer that they can't, McPheat writes.

Projects often look like failures in the middle of the process, and so leaders "must continuously make adjustments, review premises, bring the flexibility to pivot if necessary, and find the strength to persist," says Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Leaders are more likely to pull off quick decisions when they've done their research, practiced their response and remain calm during chaos, writes Ken Downer. "If we have practiced enough, when we do need to execute a task quickly, the muscle memory will be there to help us do it accurately," he writes.

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