The Blind Spots of Excellence

Elena Menichetti

Oct 11

3 min read

An organisation can know an extraordinary amount about the quality of its products while knowing much less about the conditions in which they are made.

Loro Piana offers a concrete starting point for examining this gap.

At its 2025 exhibition in Shanghai, the maison presented a space dedicated to quality control, with Baby Cashmere shown under a microscope magnifying the fibre 35,000 times.

It was a striking representation of the attention given to the material.

In July 2025, a Milan court placed Loro Piana under judicial administration following findings of labour exploitation within its subcontracting chain and inadequate supplier oversight.

The company said a supplier had subcontracted work without informing it and that it had ended the relationship after learning of it.

The measure was lifted early in April 2026.

Loro Piana said it had strengthened supplier oversight through more frequent site inspections and greater use of independent auditors.

Together, these facts raise a broader leadership question:

how does an organisation decide which parts of its reality receive rigorous scrutiny?

This is where organisational blind spots become relevant.

A blind spot is an aspect of reality that decision makers fail to recognise or understand adequately. Information may be missing, scattered across departments, or available to people whose concerns carry little influence.

Consider a hypothetical company to make the mechanism clear.

The commercial team secures larger orders.

Procurement negotiates lower prices and shorter delivery times.

Quality control confirms that the finished garments meet the required standards.

Each team can report success against its own targets.

Taken together, however, these decisions may demand more than a supplier can deliver within safe working hours and fair working conditions.

Someone needs to examine whether the combined requirements are compatible with the supplier’s actual capacity, and where the work is being performed.

The blind spot can sit between departments:

everyone sees their own result, while responsibility for understanding the combined consequences remains unclear.

This is the systemic dimension.

Decisions influence one another, and their effects extend beyond the function that made them.

The OECD’s guidance for garment and footwear supply chains addresses this connection explicitly.

Short lead times, changes to orders and price negotiations can contribute to harmful working conditions. Responsible oversight therefore includes examining the buyer’s own purchasing practices.

From a systemic leadership perspective, four changes deserve attention:

Connect the information before approving commitments.
Review order volumes, delivery times, prices, staffing and production capacity together.
Investigate discrepancies, including work assigned to further subcontractors.
Align targets with working conditions.
Evaluate managers on how results are achieved.
Give commercial and purchasing teams responsibility for checking that their demands support safe, lawful production.
Bring workers’ experience into decisions.
Use protected reporting channels, independent interviews and dialogue with workers’ representatives to understand what happens inside workplaces.
Ensure that raising a concern carries protection from retaliation.
Give warning signals the power to change a decision.
Assign clear responsibility and authority to investigate, adjust a deadline, revise an order or suspend unsafe work, while considering the impact on workers.

Together, these changes help information travel across organisational boundaries and influence decisions before harm becomes embedded in everyday operations.

For executive leadership, this means examining which concerns reach the people who set commercial priorities, what happens when those concerns conflict with a target, and who has the authority to intervene.

The test is whether a warning about working conditions can change an order, a deadline or a purchasing decision.

That is where awareness becomes an organisational capability.

#LoroPiana #SystemicLeadership #OrganisationalBlindSpots #LuxuryIndustry #ResponsibleLeadership #SupplyChainGovernance