Friendships are as deserving as any relationship to celebrate on Valentine’s Day. See: Galentine’s, Palentine’s, and (the lesser-known) Valenguy’s.

Unfortunately, friendships are hard to maintain—especially when we’re trying to progress in our careers. People tend to lament that sacrifice later, says Neal Roese, a marketing professor at Kellogg and a leading expert on the science of regret.

So what can even the busiest among us—like leaders—do to keep our friends close? Then, we hear how preparation can position you to take advantage of the next supply-chain disruption.

You’ve got a friend in me

Nonromantic relationships are particularly susceptible to benign neglect.

“We all understand that we need to invest in our relationship with our spouse or partner,” says Roese. “What might be not so obvious is that maintaining close friendships takes effort, too, and that the effort is worth it.”

This tends to be especially tricky for men. There is an interesting gender difference in the literature on how people keep friendships, Roese explains. Women are better at preserving one-on-one connections, whereas men tend to be better at forming small groups, such as sports teams. Men need an extra nudge to preserve time for one-on-one friendships.

One of the simplest ways to preserve a close friendship is to make a point of keeping it on your schedule.

“As people start getting caught up in work and family life, the first thing to go is the weekly or monthly beer you used to have with your friend,” Roese says.

Carving out time for those hangouts may feel like a distraction from your career goals, but in fact, close friendships offer much-needed perspective. As we reflect on our lives and our accomplishments, our friends can often see more clearly than we can the ways in which we have already succeeded.

“We don’t always do this well,” Roese says. “Too often, we immediately imagine the ideal—what’s the best possible outcome. But we stop there. We don’t take the time to pat ourselves on the back and feel a little bit better about all the great things we did.”

When reflecting on our past and making decisions about the future, using close friends as clear-eyed sounding boards can prevent us from making choices we will later regret.

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

Disruption or opportunity?

With supply-chain disruptions growing increasingly common, companies better prepared to face them have an opportunity to come out ahead of their competition.

“Disruptions expose the difference between firms that merely survive and those that gain strategic ground,” says Seyed Iravani, a Kellogg professor of operations by courtesy and a Northwestern professor of industrial engineering and management science.

Iravani and collaborators used game theory to model the impact of a supply-chain disruption on two firms competing for a limited backup supply of the same product component. Through this model, they identified the top-five factors that make it worthwhile for a firm to invest heavily in preparing for a disruption:

• Whether the shared backup supply is scarce;

• If it significantly impacts the competitor to lose a customer;

• Whether a firm is already at high risk of losing its own customers;

• Whether a firm is more likely to lose customers to alternative products than to its main competitor;

• Whether the competing firm is much bigger.

For example, a big firm has less incentive to invest in its backup supply when it faces a much smaller competitor. Conversely, a small firm is better positioned to steal some of its big competitor’s customers during a disruption than the other way around.

“It’s not about if a disruption is going to happen; it’s about when,” Iravani says. “And whoever is ready is going to win.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight.

See you next week,

Laura Pavin, multimedia editor
Kellogg Insight