Kathleen Foote

As a woman stepping into male-dominated fields like supply chain and manufacturing, the best advice I've received is simple: don't let imposter syndrome talk you out of your own seat at the table.

People with traditional backgrounds and formal training often come in with strong frameworks — but sometimes that very confidence makes them stop listening. They've learned about the room before they've ever been in it.

What I've come to understand is that a non-traditional background isn't a gap to apologize for. It's a lens other people don't have. You notice things. You ask questions that feel obvious to you but haven't been asked before. That's not inexperience — that's an edge.

So my advice is this: know what you bring, be brave enough to say yes before you feel completely ready, and trust that rising to the challenge is exactly how you prove — to yourself more than anyone else — that you were meant to be there.

I came into Deloitte with no direct industry experience — but I came in with a physics background, and that turned out to be more than enough. The scientific method translates beautifully: how you frame an ambiguous problem, how you ask the right questions, how you let the data lead you somewhere honest. Those instincts don't belong to any one field. They belong to anyone willing to develop them.

My advice to young women entering this industry is to stop underestimating what you already know. Focus on your transferable skills, and lean hard into your curiosity — because curiosity is what lets you adapt when the landscape shifts, and it is shifting constantly.

In a world where AI is reshaping how we work, the capabilities that will set you apart aren't the technical ones that can be automated. They're the human ones: structuring messy, complex problems. Turning an overwhelming amount of data into a clear recommendation. And then — just as importantly — having the presence and the people skills to walk into a room and actually move people to act on it.

That full arc, from ambiguous question to real-world impact, is where the value lives. And there's no reason it can't start with whatever background you're walking in with today.

Before 2020, when I told people I worked in 'supply chain', I'd be met with blank stares. Then the pandemic hit — and suddenly everyone understood, viscerally, what it meant when the system that moves raw materials, products, and services around the world stopped working. It was a wake-up call for the entire field.

And we haven't gone back to sleep since. Between climate-driven disruptions — wildfires, floods, extreme weather events interrupting production and logistics — and an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape, the rules keep changing. Tariffs shift overnight. Trade routes get disrupted. A port backs up on the other side of the world and you feel it six months later on a shelf in Colorado.

The honest answer to what the biggest challenge is? It's operating with confidence in an environment where the only constant is uncertainty. That means building organizations and systems that aren't just optimized for efficiency — because efficiency assumes stability — but that are genuinely resilient. It means knowing how to rapidly collect the right data, cut through the noise, and form a clear enough picture to act. Not perfectly. Fast enough to matter.

The companies and leaders who figure out how to be both analytical and adaptive — who can hold a rigorous point of view while staying loose enough to change course — are the ones who will define what supply chain, and business more generally, looks like in the next decade.

The value that runs through everything — my career, my travels, my life — is curiosity. A genuine, restless love of not-yet-knowing-something and wanting to find out.

In consulting, you are constantly being handed a new client, a new industry, a new problem you've never seen before. Some people find that disorienting. I find it energizing. I've never believed that being the expert in the room is the only way to add value. Sometimes the most useful person is the one who walks in genuinely open — who asks the question everyone else stopped asking because they assumed they already knew the answer.

I've traveled to over a hundred countries, and the posture I bring to a new place is the same one I bring to a new client: you arrive as a guest. You pay attention. You listen more than you talk. You ask good questions and you hold the answers lightly enough to be surprised by them. That discipline — of staying curious even when it would be easier to rely on what you already know — has shaped me as much as anything I've formally learned.

What I've found is that curiosity is also a kind of courage. It's what makes you willing to step outside your comfort zone, to take on something where you might stumble, to travel somewhere unfamiliar and trust that you'll figure it out. I've never regretted saying yes to something that stretched me. The moments I've grown the most have almost always started with not knowing what I was doing — and being okay with that.