If your company has no room for improvement in either benchmarking or contingency planning, then read no further. You have your priorities defined and are well-positioned to negotiate the next few years of volatility. I’m oversimplifying of course, but I believe the next 12-24 months will reshape many distribution sectors and markets. Here are a few reasons why.

As industry groups dive back into the fall meeting schedule, there is a sense of optimism not seen the past few years. But the pattern is tracking pretty closely to what we’ve heard from economist Dr. Adam Fein and others who track industrial markets closely. The rebound is sluggish and has the potential to stay so for a few years. A weak recovery doesn’t feel very good, as we all are finding out, but it beats what just happened.