Last April, I wrote about a whimsical Tesla analyst call. I had briefly mentioned three issues: (A) personality of the founder vs. personality of the firm (B) over-exuberance about Tesla before they could start making cars in scale. (C) cautious optimism about Tesla eventually fixing things for better. It seems like those were much simpler times, but who knew? That April call was a Donnie Darko style foreboding of many bizarre things to happen later. Since then Elon Musk’s twitter feed and other interactions only got stranger, beginning with an undergraduate-level banter on Karl Marx and capitalism, dissing people, creating tent-city and night outs at the factory, relaxing at a podcast, eventually leading to the costly “420” tweet that was fined…
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I was in Japan this summer and met some wonderful Wharton alumni. Of course, fulfilling a childhood dream, I also had a chance to take the Shinkansen (Bullet train) a few times. Of course, in these days of disrepair of public transport systems such as the MTA and Amtrak, Shinkansen is an engineering marvel. But more than the engineering feat, what is impressive (of course, as an operations prof) was the nearly flawless operations of the Shinkansen. Shinkansen bullet trains leave south from train tracks in Tokyo every 7-9 minutes. This frequency is nothing short of amazing. If you consider the fact that the Hakari express takes 3 hours to get to Shin-Osaka station outside Osaka, there are 20-26 trains…
Leave a CommentIt has been slow at the Poiesis blog, as the end of semester duties draw to an end. Meanwhile interesting operations events have occurred at our horizon of interest. Notes will follow on this topics, but here are some quick thoughts. Amazon released its annual report. Now AMZ is a 177B company. Looking at Bezos’s letter, there is an emphasized continued focus on the e-commerce challenge in India. In fact, India is the only “geographic” bullet point among the highlighted bullet points in the report. Amazon has moved into India and my prediction remains strong that Amazon is likely to win this battle out and will soon be the biggest retailer in India. (Contrast this with China). An interesting tidbit: Bezos…
Leave a CommentThis is third (and final) in the series of posts thinking aloud about the Facebook Kerfuffle. See the first post on the nature of Information Leakage, and the second post on FOMO and how networks fall. In this post, I spend some time mulling about societal, not social, aspects of the network, the compliance, and the complicity of everyone including researchers. I suggest some operational changes that could be helpful. This is a complicated platform problem; There is no magic bullet, but a hodgepodge of contextual solutions, but I try to frame them in an over-arching narrative. — Thinking about Facebook, I recollect a conversation that I had with a researcher on networks, and a good friend (in real life), …
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This is the second article in a series of posts on thinking about Facebook Kerfuffle. You can read the first article (on Leaky Platforms) here. In this post, I focus on how networks can fall. To illustrate the tentativeness in the growth and decay of platforms, bear with me, as I start with a Romantic Comedy from the 80s. In the under-rated classic Say Anything (above picture), John Cusack’s underachieving and kickboxing Lloyd woos Ione Skye’s accomplished and resplendent Diane, by playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, on a boombox held over his shoulders, loudly beseeching her to come back. It is an iconic pop-culture scene, freezing the eighties — before the advent of the late nineties of Windows and the aughts…
Leave a CommentIn the light of Guardian’s investigative reporting sourced on the whistleblower at Cambridge Analytica, it appears that almost all of the internet has been upset with Facebook. After an extended silence of several days, Zuckerberg was finally on a semi-apology tour of “exclusive” interviews about the “breach” of trust or data (or both or neither). In many ways, we are witnessing a perfect storm of confusion involving politics, modern notions of privacy, the role of tech in our lives, the ethics of data-sharing/micro-targeting, and organizational leadership. Instead of ruminating on the above issues, I focus on three specific aspects of Facebook kerfuffle over a set of three blog posts. (This post is entirely focusing on the first issue.) Platform Designs…
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Lego’s revenues for 2017 are now out. In September 2017, Financial Times reported on problems at Lego, which was then planning to cut about 8% of its workforce. Indeed, Lego has been suffering from increasingly bigger global operations problems, with poor sales in Europe and North America. There have been reports of inventories piling up at distribution centers. One of the reasons attributed for Lego’s troubles is that Lego has been distracted from its core competencies, by investing in movie franchising and so on. While that is partly true, as I will explain below, Lego’s core business itself has some fundamental issues, that need to be resolved. Let’s look at some Data and I point out two issues with Lego’s Operations Planning.…
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