Here are some films and podcast episodes that I liked in 2018. Sights (Film, TV, etc.) Bladerunner 2049 was a thought provoking movie and a well-deserved sequel to Bladerunner. Love per Square Foot was a cheerful and peppy urban love story set in Bombay. NetFlix has made a movie that Bollywood has forgotten how to make. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell made by BBC boasts high production and some great acting by all the principal characters. The TV series is less-nuanced than Susannah Clarke’s book by the same name, i.e., the TV series is darker and misses the whimsical funny elements in the book, that are understandably harder to translate to screen. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (season 1) is great…
Leave a CommentMonth: December 2018
During the holiday travels, one of the vexing things that you might have come across is people in a hurry, those who hurtle by at excessive speed on airport escalators, as you stand. Conversely, you might be the one trying to get back to your boarding area but blocked by a slow traveler carrying an unmanageable volume of luggage bags, more than what one ought to carry on enjoyable trips. In this article, I return to one of my favorite Operations topics in social behavior. Should people stand left (or right, depending on the country) in moving escalators, so that people in a hurry can walk by? Is that efficient? It turns out not. It is better for everyone if we do…
Leave a CommentI write a lot about internet operations on this blog. In the Wharton core Operations class, we teach a catalog business case, where I make the point that catalog business is a good way to understand the advantages and disadvantages of Amazon’s internet retail model. So, it is an amazing reaffirmation to hear that Amazon has released a print catalog — their first one! — in 2018 December. See the picture on the right. It is interesting to note that Internet shipping Operations have come a full circle. Of course, there are new tweaks. Like all things that Amazon does, it is based on data. Depending on your purchases, you may or may not have received it. It is as…
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Leave a CommentHighlighting 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 CommentTsundoku / Anti-Library of 2018 This is the year in which the exquisitely fine word Tsundoku entered our lexicon. So, the end of the year is a good time to evaluate the dreams for future reading. I don’t buy books impulsively much, but there is always a running list I would like to buy. In some sense, my tsundoku is my anti-library. It appears that I will fall short of my 2018 reading goal (here is my reading list for 2018), but this is only a good thing in Umberto Eco’s view of the Library of life. Life is short, there are always miles to go and promises to keep. Here are the recent books that are hovering on my radar and beckoning…
Leave a CommentBad Blood by John Carreyrou was the most unputdownable book that I read in 2018. The book reveals that the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Reading the astounding details on Theranos, once a revered Silicon valley unicorn and a health care startup, I had to constantly remind myself that many narrated incidents did take place, and the names are real people that walk among us in flesh and blood today. The indelicate machinations of the principal actors in the book are comparable to the over-the-top villainy that we read in airport thrillers and potboilers. Some of them are composites of miscreants in Robin Cook’s medical thrillers and John Grisham’s legal thrillers.1 The victims carry the quiet fatalism of the…
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