If you Google difficult recipes, Duck Pâté en Croûte pops up. It’s a time-intensive recipe that can take longer than 24 hours to prepare (“a labor of love”). To hit the mark, one must procure special ingredients, concoct a flaky homemade pastry dough, and chill it overnight at exacting temperatures. Meanwhile, on the other end of the culinary spectrum, there’s gumbo. Gumbos are a far less meticulous endeavor. Ingredients run the gamut, from chicken, duck, squirrel (yes, squirrel), shrimp, crab, and sausage, to onions, parsley, bell pepper, celery, okra, tomatoes, and really, anything you can scrounge up around the kitchen. The point we’re trying to make isn’t that one is better than the other — unless they start serving pâtés on the value menu at McDonalds, we probably won’t be indulging in one anytime soon — but certainly the more refined recipe takes far greater effort to execute. And for that extra effort, surely the upside is much higher. It’s sort of like putting together an intelligent, end-to-end supply chain: if you want the upside of total visibility and transparency, you don’t want your supply chain to be put together like gumbo.

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