Sean Kerins, chief operating officer at Arrow Electronics, will become CEO on June 1 and a board member after this month's annual meeting. Kerins will succeed Michael Long, who will become executive chairman.

Multistory warehouses represent a small yet growing part of the industrial landscape in the US, with these properties offering a way to serve urban markets with limited space. A Prologis report notes that transportation tends to be the largest supply chain cost, meaning that these projects can be economically viable even though they may cost more per square foot. "Tenants are looking at their delivery networks, trying to solve how to deliver under tight delivery windows," says Alex Kachris of JLL.

Piece-picking robot technology has advanced to the point where logistics companies are looking to use the robots to unload freight carried by truck and plane. FedEx has trained some employees to oversee and support robots.

The "perception of humanness" is the key to creating business-to-business content experiences that inspire trust, writes B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee, adding that storytelling focused on empathy is a critical component of such content. "The closer you can get to your buyers and customers seeing your story as their story, the more humanness will be perceived as present in our content experiences," Albee writes.

Some sales outcomes are outside of your control, and managers should be paying more attention to root causes they can affect, such as insufficient activity, poor leadership or low standards, writes Anthony Iannarino. "When a leader expects too little of people, those in their charge will meet those low expectations, or in some cases, they will do even less," Iannarino writes.

New leaders should take the first month to meet people and learn, the second month to start planning and select priorities, and the final 40 days to evaluate subordinates while enacting customer-specific strategies, writes Profit Isle Chairman Jonathan Byrnes. "Most importantly, through this process you will be tacitly communicating to your organization that you are a thorough, grounded, visionary manager who will lead the organization to achieve far-reaching goals," Byrnes writes.

Leadership is an ongoing journey, so people in power must be careful not to compromise their values, to blame those promoted past their capabilities or to prioritize compensation over team welfare, writes Kristin Hendrix. "We can never learn so much that we're done growing," Hendrix writes.

If you are looking for insights on creating and building your marketplace strategy, NAW offers this free webinar for distribution leaders on Marketplace Disruption and Strategic Response on Thursday, May 12, 2022. You will hear from Ian Heller, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Distribution Strategy Group, and Alex Moazed, founder and CEO of Applico. These two Thought Leaders along with a panel of distributors, will discuss their own marketplace strategies and share the business decisions that led to their specific strategies. Be sure to register today!

The NAW Billion Dollar Company Roundtables are an exclusive community of thought leaders from Billion Dollar distribution enterprises who congregate to network with non-competing peers in multiple lines of trade on key issues. The companies invited into this community are from distribution firms at or above $1 billion in annual sales. Register today!