The Containers Podcast mini-series (with eight self-contained 30-minute episodes) by Alexis Madrigal at Atlantic is amazing! As an Operations academic in a business school, I am a fan of both nitty-gritty details and narrative story-telling canvas. When I came across the Containers podcast my stoicism vanished, and I was giddy with excitement. Containers are one of those mundane things that fundamentally changed global trade and turned supply chains into complex organisms. You would be completely mistaken to think that a podcast on containers would be boring. Alexis Madrigal brilliantly weaves logistics facts with human interest stories that form the cogs in gigantic machinery of global trade. He talks about the history of Oakland, the “deaths” of longshoremen, poetry, Filipino lives, logistics,…
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The Hudsucker Proxy is my second favorite Coen brothers movie on rewatchability.1 Within their oeuvre, The Hudsucker Proxy is closest to capturing the humor in American manufacturing/business culture (exceeded only by William H. Macy’s exasperated car salesman role in Fargo). While talking about Dynamic pricing in class, I typically refer to the funny story in Hudsucker Proxy, which has a retailer (ostensibly, all retailers) adjusting the price of HulaHoops in the light of the increased demand. Here is the embedded video from the movie that shows the design of the product, progression into the production process, and testing, leading to its retail sales — the lifecycle of hope, demise, and rebirth of a product. The movie also features Jennifer Jason…
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Where do temporary e-commerce workers come from? I noticed that Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, a book I enjoyed reading earlier in November, was listed in the NYTimes 100 Notable Non-Fiction books of 2017. Well-deserved recognition for the book. I recommend the book review by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who has written several deeply informative books on the nature of work and life in America. Here is an excerpt from Dr. Hochschild’s review. Moving “like blood cells through the veins of the country,” Jessica Bruder writes, a growing number of older people, post-recession refugees from the middle and working class, are, like Linda, crossing the land in their Jeeps, campers and repurposed buses in search of work. … Other nomads “pick raspberries in Vermont, apples in…
Leave a Comment[A deviation from usual Operations Posts]. Star Wars is easily the second biggest cultural export of the United States. (Disney is No 1. So it seems natural that Disney eventually acquired the rights to Star Wars). Parents often want to share the excitement of the mythology of Star Wars with young kids. This is not easy for those who lived through the nostalgia of the 80s that was nearly corrupted by the tragedies of the 90s prequels. Such parents often ponder the following question: In what order do I introduce Star Wars to my kids? The following advice follows from my experience. (Caveat: I don’t claim to be the biggest fan of Star Wars, and the following idea is definitely…
Leave a CommentReview: Zama (Author: Antonio Di Benedetto, translated by Esther Allen). As a researcher interested in the science of waiting times, I read Zama with great interest to understand how literature treats waiting. Zama is a tale of one man’s slow descent into perdition, a catalog of unfulfilled dreams and airy castles in future, and a compelling narrative of a mind idling in vacuous machinations. Don Diego de Zama is posted in a remote outpost of Asuncion, Paraguay in the late 18th century, separated from his wife and family and the civilized society of Buenos Aires where he aspires to be instead. Zama believes the posting to be a temporary blip in his exalted bureaucratic service — an onerous test of…
Leave a CommentA single step and thousand miles, and all that. As Laozi said. Even if, and especially if, the journey is on a Möbius strip.
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