Highlighting some books that I loved reading in 2018. These are not necessarily books that were published in 2018. (Before I get into the list, I loved three wonderful books by my colleagues this year: The Customer Centricity Playbook by Peter Fader and Sarah Toms, Never Stop Learning by Brad Staats, and The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust by Kevin Werbach. I am finishing the last one now). Business and Society: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou is the most unputdownable book of the year. Here is my Review. The Great A&P and Struggle for Small Business in America by Marc Levinson is an excellent way to understand Amazon and its challenges. Automation and Artificial…
Leave a CommentTag: Artificial Intelligence
The past is more opaque than the future. Even when we know the “rough” history of what transpired, it is sometimes hard to imagine, how things were before the natural evolution into the current “normalcy” occurred. I imagine that, very soon, it would be astounding to consumers that Amazon did not own any stores, and Apple did not make any phones. How was life before that? In this respect, Barbara Garson’s The Electronic Sweatshop is revelatory, because it discusses a mind-and-place that is hard to imagine because many automated things came to be. For examples, she writes (Pg. 177), When typewriters were first introduced, their operators were also called “typewriters”. Later they became typists. So far in the electronic office,…
Leave a CommentHow to think about the role of Artificial Intelligence in Operations? Many people talk up AI, IoT, automation, etc, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (following steam power, electricity, and computerization). Here is an example. I am more persuaded by the counter-arguments. For example, see a post by Luke Muehlhauser arguing there was only one industrial revolution, because one of the revolutions is substantively larger than, and different from the others, as exhibited in the figure below (data from the site). The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, which ironically, I read on paper, explores the effects of the rapid digitization and information technological advances (AI, Automation, etc) on the nature of work, wealth and society. Brynjolfsson and McAfee…
Leave a CommentBloomberg has an excellent article on Retail Apocalypse, filled with some neat data visualizations, which I highly recommend. (Read the whole thing!) While media and political discussions have generally focused on the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs (e.g. Carrier, Rexnord, etc.) and the death of certain industries (coal, mining – which actually hire relatively fewer people than retail), I have always thought that there has been relatively little attention on Retail Jobs that have been lost in the past few years. For sure, Retail has been undergoing an accelerated sea-change due to the growth of e-commerce, historic suburban over-storing decisions, and the influence of changing customer tastes. However, at the heart of this crisis, is the loss of retail jobs and…
Leave a CommentIn 2014, Tech Crunch reported Amazon filing a patent for “Anticipatory Shipping”, i.e., getting the package ready for shipping even before a customer orders the package. The coverage on this issue has been minimal. Today, through a student (ht: PB), here is an article on Economist (subscription required) about German firm Otto using AI and machine-learning to purchase 200,000 items a month from third-party suppliers without any human intervention. The orders are made purely based on machine learning on 3 billion prior transactions and a variety of variables (weather, etc.). Two important factors stood out from the article. Customers are less likely to return if the product arrived within two days. Pre-shipping helps eliminate risks due to shipping delays. (There…
Leave a Comment