How to achieve strategic orchestration: The transition from operator to orchestrator requires both organizational and technological transformations: –Curate the ecosystem: Identify and nurture a diverse portfolio of strategic partners that complement one another’s strengths. Replace transactional procurement with co-development, open innovation and data-sharing agreements that build resilience. –Align incentives: Engineer commercial agreements, data-sharing practices and performance measures around collective success – reliability, performance, quality, responsiveness and innovation – rather than short-term cost (see “Imperative in action 1”). –Build a digital nervous system: Integrate real-time data from production, logistics and policy signals into a unified operations tower. AI turns this data into foresight to help anticipate disruptions before they propagate and enable swift and holistic decisions (see “Imperative in action 2”). –Enable dynamic resource allocation: Treat capital, production capacity and talent as mobile assets. Shift them fluidly across regions and partners as policy, demand or risk profiles change. Orchestration is ultimately a leadership discipline. To influence outcomes without full control requires humility, diplomacy and the ability to balance transparency with strategic advantage. Orchestrating agility in a fragmented toy supply chain A global quick-service restaurant sources toys from more than 15 suppliers. To improve agility without contractual control, the brand partnered with Black Lake Technologies to deploy a cloud-native shopfloor platform across its toy suppliers to enable real-time production data sharing. Three suppliers adopted that platform, sharing live production data through a secure interface, while others declined and accepted delivery penalty risks. The brand rewarded the three integrated suppliers with more, higher-margin orders, demonstrating how trust and shared incentives can drive technology adoption, improve visibility and enhance flexibility even in fragmented supply networks. Building end-to-end supply chain visibility with cloud-native operations tower Microsoft has built a cloud-native operations tower to unify its vast, siloed Azure supply chain. Powered by digital-twin and real-time data, it tracks hardware components from hubs to system integrators, through assembly, warehousing and delivery to data centres. The system provides a single source of verified information for more than 500 decision-makers across organizations and regions, integrating logistics, inventory and deployment into one cohesive view. By enhancing visibility and coordination with partners, the platform enables faster, insight-driven decisions – helping Microsoft ensure cloud capacity meets demand while proactively identifying and mitigating disruptions across its global network.12 IMPERATIVE IN ACTION 1 IMPERATIVE IN ACTION 2 Global Value Chains Outlook 2026: Orchestrating Corporate and National Agility 12