Are millennials warming to logistics?

Aging logistics managers have voiced concerns for some time that the next generation of logistics leaders are slipping away to sexier industries like – well seriously, bro, is there really anything hotter than full end-to-end supply chain visibility?

The good news is that community-based crowdsourcing platform Owler, which gathers information from a younger-skewing demographic, saw the professional categories “Transportation & Warehousing” rise 8.2 percent to become the second-highest-rated industry, second only to retail, in a recent poll.

However popular logistics might be, individual companies still have a way to go before they can compete with the attractiveness of software firms, which populated the entire top-10 for top ranked private companies. Just try hiring in Seattle, with companies like Amazon.com and Google prowling the labor market.

For publicly held companies, Delta, J.B. Hunt, and Alaska all made it into the top 50, but that’s still not in AutoZone’s zone, so here too, logistics needs to step up its game.

Industry data for the logistics sector indicates that whomever is at the helm right now is doing a pretty good job. Across modes, volumes and revenues are up, fuel costs are low and load factors are high. It’s going to be a great year for Christmas bonuses in the business, but perhaps industry bosses need to smile a bit more or something because that’s not translating into popularity. Of the 50 most popular U.S. CEOs, not even one helmed a logistics company.

Narrowed down to “Transportation & Warehousing” CEOs, forwarding and logistics companies seemed pretty happy with the folks in the corner office. Kerry Logistics CEO, Ma Wing Kai William, and GEODIS boss, Marie Christine Lombard, took top honors, tying at a rating 98.1 out of a possible 100 points.

However, it’s not all smiles and handshakes farther down the logistics popularity chain, most notably at companies such as Expeditors, where CEO Jeffrey S. Musser ranked just 36.4 out of 100 points, and at United, where its beleaguered boss, Oscar Munoz, scored a dismal 21.5 out of 100.

When it comes to airline’s ranking, KLM’s boss Pieter Elbers took the No. 1 slot for the second year in a row, despite reports of friction rising from the AF-KLM merger and a clash of Dutch and French management styles.