supply-chain management

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Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

Retrieved July 21, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Supply chain event management with mySAP supply chain management (white paper). (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 22, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Supply chain execution with mySAP supply chain management (white paper). (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 22, 2003, from www.sap.com/ The inventory collaboration hub in mySAP supply chain management, SAP solutions brief. (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 23, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Transportation management with mySAP SCM, SAP solutions in detail. (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 23, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Visibility with mySAP supply chain management, SAP solutions brief. (2003). SAP.

Additionally, the areas of procurement cards, online management of expenses and payroll, and online travel centers are covered. Chapter VII deals with the conversion cycle. The focus in this chapter is not on production activities but on supply chain management. The production function is now part of an extended collaborative enterprise in many organizations. Cost accounting is not merely assessing product costs but also striving to identify and optimize costs across the supply chain. Basic principles of supply chain management, software tools for supply chain management, and changes in cost accounting are covered here. Finally, Chapter VIII considers the general ledger cycle. This chapter discusses the evolution of the general ledger and financial reporting.

., & Cooper, B. (2002). Supply chain logistics management (international ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Cloud, R. (2000, August). Supply Chain Management: New role for finance professionals. Strategic Finance, 29-32. Cooke, J. (2002, March). Why Ace is becoming the place? Logistics Management, 3436. Coordination with mySAP supply chain management (white paper). (2003). SAP. Retrieved July 7, 2003, from www.sap.com/ Creating a networked value chain with Oracle supply chain management (white paper). (2003). Oracle. Retrieved July 8, 2003, from www.oracle.com/ E-business solution for financial management (white paper). (2003).


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

The Economist also noted the intrinsic link between globalization and supply chains: “Globalisation requires greatly increased co-ordination of transport by road, rail, sea, air and now also by an entirely new route to market: the internet. This makes logistics vastly more complex. The job of ensuring that all these things work together is known as supply-chain management.”5 Globalization and supply chains have a symbiotic relationship. Although this section focuses on how the rise of international trade created longer and deeper supply networks, it is important to remember that these networks, in turn, fuel globalization. In this chapter we diagnose the risks of supply chain management and of global business management more generally. As in the case of the financial sector, we show that the efficiency benefits of globalization have associated risks and that profit-maximizing behavior can create negative externalities.

We start by noting the rise of international trade in the twenty-first century. We examine how political changes and technological innovation gave rise to global supply chains. An analysis of “best practices” in supply chain management shows how these supply networks are vulnerable to systemic risk. We then seek to identify ways to make supply networks more resilient. This chapter’s conclusion draws lessons for systemic thinking from supply chain management and considers how the resilience and robustness of the system may be improved. GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS We begin by considering the rise of global supply chains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Reprinted from Stefano Battiston et al., 2007, “Credit Chains and Bankruptcy Propagation in Production Networks,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 31 (6): 2061–2084, diagrams on 2073. Used with permission from Elsevier. Learning from Supply Chains Many supply chain managers are aware of the risks we have discussed. In a recent survey of international supply chain managers, McKinsey and Company found that product complexity and financial volatility were among the most important determinants of supply chain strategies.48 Their survey also documents that these professionals perceived supply chain risk as being greater in 2008 than in 2006.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

Supply chains can be shortened and lengthened, formed and reformed, rejigged and replanned, with a speed and ease inconceivable in Ford's time. But this does not mean that the job of supply chain management has grown more complex. In Ford's time, the supply chain manager had to set up his own system of runners to monitor the supply chain and make sure that it was working properly. If the chain was in danger of coming apart, the manager had to work out the solution on the spot. If shifts in market conditions required that the supply chain be recalculated, the manager had to do the recalculating. Among the skills of a contemporary supply chain manager, with the help of user-friendly graphs and charts, is to make sense of the information the system sends to his workstation.

The third element was labeled human resources and included such things as personnel administration, planning, and development. 153 154 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY From the mid-1990s onward, SAP's success in marketing software products that integrate these three functions gave rise to the new acronym ERP. It has remained a convention of the industry that ERP refers to the integration of these activities—logistics, accounting, and human resource management. Processes whose integration with this inner core has come later, such as customer relations management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) are usually described as add-ons to the original ERP. In a 1999 report on ERP, Deloitte Consulting estimated that in 1998 SAP had a 66 percent share of the U.S. market, and Oracle an 11 percent share.1 Despite its obscurity, ERP is therefore a driving force in the reshaping of American business, particularly in service industries.

Continuing in this over-heated vein, Deloitte tells its clients that it is not "by simply turning the system on, but by forcefully moving into the deeper journey [that] the full capabilities and benefits of the ERP-enabled enterprise are found."33 In its early stages, at least, this "deeper journey" passes through some of the flattest topography of the business landscape—customer relations management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). In both spheres, scientific management is firmly established as the controlling philosophy of management, so the closer integration of these two processes with the existing processes of ERP simply reinforces the already dominant role of scientific management in the workings of ERP.


The Unusual Billionaires by Saurabh Mukherjea

Albert Einstein, asset light, Atul Gawande, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate governance, dematerialisation, disintermediation, diversification, equity risk premium, financial innovation, forensic accounting, full employment, inventory management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Peter Thiel, QR code, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, work culture

Amongst its competitors, Asian Paints is the only other firm which has initiated similar steps like its Home Solutions and Color Consultancy services. Improving supply chain management: In the absence of centralized supply chain management infrastructure, managing inventory levels becomes a tough task. Data analytics can be used to improve forecasting demand at a pan-India level; however, without proper supply chain infrastructure, even data analytics cannot achieve much. Whilst Asian Paints took the lead in installing a technologically advanced centralized supply chain management and ERP system over 1999–2002, Berger implemented a similar technological advancement in its distribution channel in 2012 in collaboration with Oracle.

Most paint manufacturers focus on high-quality management recruits, but only Asian Paints recruits from the top B-schools of India for junior and mid-level managerial roles. Ambit’s consumer sector team believes that on these above mentioned six parameters, Asian Paints scores best on supply chain management, product range, marketing initiatives and quality of management professionals. Berger scores best on product range (alongside Asian Paints) and benefits to dealers/painters. Berger is just a shade behind Asian on some parameters (like supply chain management and quality of management professionals), but on almost all parameters, it is significantly ahead of the remaining large Indian paints companies, namely Kansai Nerolac and Akzo Nobel.

A former employee of Asian Paints recalls, ‘All credit to the directors that they understood that if we have to keep the flag flying, we had to have a relook at several aspects of the business, like technology, formulations, etc.’ Separately, the professional management team shifted the firm’s focus of relying on in-house development of Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to procuring IT from third-party vendors. In 1999, the first phase of this included procuring software for supply chain management from i2 Technologies (a US-based company), which centralized and automated a large part of the process of demand forecasting, production planning and raw material procurement. The second phase included setting up of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software in July 2000 across India. During our discussions with him, Anand said, ‘The demand forecasting offered by i2’s software helped us a lot.


pages: 301 words: 88,082

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business by Richard Brooks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, financial deregulation, financial engineering, haute couture, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, mega-rich, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, shareholder value, short selling, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, two and twenty

In 2010 Glaxo reported worldwide pre-tax profits of £4.5bn but appeared to pay little if any UK corporation tax, showing benefits from the tax credits and from using Singapore’s special tax status of around £115m and £80m respectively.‌9 AstraZeneca, a similarly enthusiastic tax haven user, in 1999 ensured that what would turn out to be its blockbuster anti-cholesterol drug Crestor (with sales over $5bn by 2010), was licensed around the world from the Caribbean tax haven of Puerto Rico.‌10 The company now shaves several hundreds of millions of dollars off its annual tax bill by using such territories.‌11 ‘Tax-efficient supply chain management’ – as it has become known in one of those obfuscatory tax euphemisms – offers huge scope for tax dodging as established and newer tax havens bend over backwards to host the management, intellectual property, financing and other facets of a business that can be commoditized, moved and priced.

Our biggest corporate visitors feed from it every bit as greedily. Over here and under-taxed The same post-war growth in international markets that allowed British multinationals to strike out abroad also opened up the domestic market’s sixty million consumers to their foreign counterparts. And by the late 1990s ‘tax efficient supply chain management’ was enabling them to access this source of profit while making precious little tax contribution to Britain’s public coffers. The trick again is to own anything of any value somewhere convenient. So Nike’s British stocks are owned by a Dutch company called Nike European Operations Netherlands BV while the business of selling them on its behalf is performed by British company Nike (UK) Ltd.

Fast forward to 2009 and 2010, and the move provided some comfort for the struggling retailer. The £25m losses of Dutch-incorporated but UK tax resident Gap Netherlands BV swamped the profits of the UK commission company GPS (Great Britain) Ltd and the tax bill vanished.‌14 The effect of tax-efficient supply chain management on UK tax payments hit the headlines in 2012 when Reuters analysed a series of US companies’ contributions and found that Starbucks had paid just £8.3m tax on several billions of pounds’ worth of sales since 1998 and nothing for several years. At the same time it had been telling investors – as anybody strolling along a high street would agree – that its British operations were prospering.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

(WalMart 2007) In typical computationalist fashion, this language explicitly gestures at benefits for individual consumers while eliding altogether the main reason for which Wal-Mart uses computer systems, which is to maximize profit by minimizing a variety of previously smooth spaces in the supply chain— here, the space devoted to warehousing excess product or left empty due to selling faster than predicted. Wal-Mart’s implementation of a variety of ERP software packages for supply-chain management creates pressure in several nodes in the economic system. Now Wal-Mart’s suppliers must either themselves implement supply-chain management systems, or risk the same warehousing issues that used to be the provenance of Wal-Mart itself; in turn, other companies are pressured both externally and internally to comply with Wal-Mart’s system, which in the most usual case involves implementation of similar computer systems.

Surprisingly, though, despite the ways in which Friedman’s first three benefits replicate colonial logic and largely benefit large corporations, the rest of his ten “forces” are even more explicitly focused on corporations. In fact, they are largely devoted to exactly the kinds of business-process tools discussed in Chapter 7: ERP, CRM, and other supply-chain management software. Friedman champions open source software, especially Linux, but primarily because IBM realized that it could profit from the distributed community that had created it (which is itself largely made up of corporate employees working without compensation in their free time); arguably, we still talk about Linux precisely because of its utility to profitmaking corporations.

Yes, Linux was created through distributed means, but how the outsourcing of work to essentially donated labor contributes to economic or cultural flatness remains a mystery. Then Friedman champions the “withering global competition” (149) enabled by WTO-backed treaties and IT-fueled communication via what he calls “offshoring”; the supply-chain management techniques used by Wal-Mart: “as consumers, we love supply chains, because they deliver us all sorts of goods—from tennis shoes to laptop computers—at lower and lower prices and tailored more and more precisely to just what we want” (155), despite the fact that “as workers, we are sometimes ambivalent or hostile to these supply chains, because they expose us to higher and higher pressures to compete, and force our companies to cut costs, and also, at times, cut wages and benefits” (ibid.).


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

They analyze historical sales and pricing trends to establish prices in real time and get the highest yield possible from each transaction. They use sophisticated experiments to measure the overall impact or “lift” of advertising and other marketing strategies and then apply their insights to future analyses. Strange Bedfellows? At first glance, supply chain management and customer relationship management would seem to have little in common. Supply chain management, on the one hand, seems like a natural fit for an analytical focus. For years, operations management specialists have created algorithms to help companies keep minimal levels of inventory on hand while preventing stock-outs—among other supply chain challenges.

., customer and supplier) relationships, offers even more possibilities for competition. 5 COMPETING ON ANALYTICS WITH EXTERNAL PROCESSES Customer and Supplier Applications ANALYTICS TOOK A GREAT LEAP forward when companies began using them to improve their external processes—those related to managing and responding to customer demand and supplier relationships. Once kept strictly segregated, the boundaries between customer relationship management (CRM) processes such as sales and marketing and supply chain management (SCM) processes such as procurement and logistics have been broken down by organizations seeking to align supply and demand more accurately. Unlike internal processes that lie completely within the organization’s direct control, externally focused processes require cooperation from outsiders, as well as their resources.

Yu and his team began by integrating all the elements of their supply chain in order to coordinate supplier sourcing decisions. To determine the optimal sourcing strategy (determining the right mix of joint replenishment, coordinated replenishment, and single sourcing) as well as manage all the logistics to get a product from manufacturer to customer, Amazon.com applies advanced optimization and supply chain management methodologies and techniques across its fulfillment, capacity expansion, inventory management, procurement, and logistics functions. For example, after experimenting with a variety of packaged software solutions and techniques, Yu concluded that no existing approach to modeling and managing supply chains would fit their needs.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

That’s because there are practically no barriers preventing entry to entrepreneurship online: if you’ve got a laptop and a credit card, you’re in business. But manufacturing was always seen as something else entirely. Making stuff is expensive; it needs equipment and skills in everything from machining to supply-chain management. It usually requires huge up-front investments, and mistakes lead to warehouses of unsellable inventory. Failure may be celebrated online, where the cost of entry is relatively low, but in the world of making stuff, failing means ruination. Atoms are weighty, and so are the consequences of their failure.

It’s gotten a lot of use since then, and I’ve since upgraded to a second-generation machine—the “Thing-O-Matic.”) Racks of components were lined up for the next batch, and laser cutters were humming their way through stacks of thin plywood for the frames. The creators were learning the realities of supply-chain management the hard way—those boxes couldn’t go out until the last parts were in them, but some components hadn’t arrived in time and others had arrived defective. A MakerBot has hundreds of parts, and if just one of them is missing, it can’t ship. The alternative to what I was seeing—scores of boxes waiting for weeks to be completed—is to over-order everything to ensure that all the components are always in stock.

Somebody has to do the manufacturing, handle the inventory, get the liability insurance, and run the customer support, and that takes money, a legal structure, and real day-to-day responsibilities. Thus, a company. So, in the new manufacturing model, you need a new kind of manufacturing company, too. At its core, it has to incorporate all the skills and learning of traditional manufacturing companies—tight quality control, efficient inventory management, and supply-chain management—so that it can compete with them on basic price and quality. But it also needs to incorporate many of the skills of Web companies in creating and harnessing a community around its products that allow it to design new goods faster, better, cheaper. In short, it must be like the best hardware companies and the best software companies.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Chapter 3 explains how customers are becoming ever more demanding. They increasingly want tailored products and services where and when they desire. It describes the trend towards mass customisation, and how new tools (such as robotics and 3D printers) and new approaches (such as social manufacturing and continuous production) can help operations and supply chain managers “flex” their production, logistics and service assets to satisfy demanding customers better and more cheaply. It draws on examples from cars (BMW and Volkswagen), pharmaceuticals (GSK and Novartis), cement (Cemex), soft drinks (Coca-Cola) and energy (GDF-Suez and GE). The goal of flexing assets is not only about saving resources, such as carrying less inventory, but also about saving time – a business’s most valuable resource.

Sharing data with partners Collecting real-time demand signals is useless without also sharing those insights with suppliers and distributors. This is especially important in heavily outsourced multi-tiered supply chains. Otherwise, firms risk playing a game of phone tag that leads to mis-communication and distorted demand signals being perceived by upstream suppliers. This is why Cemex, a cement supplier, has integrated its supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to respond better to customer inquiries, co-ordinate distribution processes with partners, and streamline operations at its distribution terminals. Cemex estimates this SCM/CRM integration – implemented with its technology partner, SAP – has saved it millions of dollars since 2005 through lower freight costs, fewer calls to the customer care centre and higher productivity during peak hours at its terminals.

The company has managed 29% more customer transactions with the same headcount, delivered over 99% of its orders on time without problems (up from 95%), and halved the volume of calls regarding account information. More and more manufacturers are also investing in tools that provide end-to-end supply chain visibility. This helps them detect changes and disruptions at all stages of production and distribution, and then alert partners. Supply chain management tools have always been good at providing order management, order status and total cost; with outsourcing, though, companies also want their external partners and customers to have this information. According to KPMG’s 2013 Global Manufacturing Outlook, nearly 50% of the manufacturers surveyed lack visibility beyond their tier 1 partners, and less than 10% can evaluate the impact of supply chain disruptions within hours.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

Generally Accepted Information Principles Like a world traveler who gains an appreciation for different cultures, bringing home and embracing the best of each, let’s look at what we can “bring home” to the land of information management from the world of asset management. Over the next couple chapters, we’ll be exploring asset management standards, principles, and methods we can borrow from a variety of other disciplines, including: physical asset management, supply chain management, IT, and software asset management—and from records management, intellectual property management, and even library science, among others. For framing a set of information asset management doctrine, let’s turn to yet another standard: the U.S. accounting set of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Do they really sense and respond and adapt to both immediate and gradual shifts in their larger environment the way biological ecosystems do? Only if someone coded them that way. Someday soon we will witness an entire supply chain driven by a neural network. Perhaps we should be conceiving and planning for that day. Already, certain players in certain supply chains manage and store much of the information flow. Think: Walmart. Or Coca-Cola. As Don Keough, the former president of Coke once said, “Whoever has information fastest and uses it wins.”3 It’s probably something Sun Tzu once said, too.4 In Japan, keiretsus are the renowned corporate ecosystems formed around trust, sharing, collaboration, and coordination.

Similarly, services that the information organization provides application developers, IT, and business users can and should be defined along the lines of ITSM and common enterprise content management (ECM) practices and principles. Too often, even in mature information organizations, the services and resources they provide and how to engage them are ill-defined when compared to the discipline of IT service management. However, the supply chain management (SCM) discipline instructs that it’s not possible to pre-plan and predefine all the ways assets are going to be leveraged. Remember, a well-oiled supply chain process has the equal ability to handle make-to-stock and make-to-order requirements. Even the best data lake or DAAS architecture isn’t going to be able to accommodate all information needs.


Construction Project Management by S. Keoki Sears

8-hour work day, active measures, air freight, independent contractor, inventory management, Parkinson's law, scientific management, supply-chain management, value engineering, zero day

It could be defective material. It could be the wrong item or an item that has not been approved. Managing the supply chain affects all aspects of the project. As previously indicated, it directly impacts budget and schedule. Improper supply chain management can also affect cash flow, customer relations, and reputation. It behooves the project manager to understand general concepts of supply chain management and to be able to manage the supply chain for the specific materials on the project. One way to understand the supply chain is to diagram the steps from the point of origin to the point of installation. The point of origin for construction would typically be a supplier or distributor, but the process actually begins with the specification by the designer and generally follows these steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

It developed from the Japanese automobile industry, specifically Toyota, but has evolved into broad application across the manufacturing industry and now is being adapted for application in the construction context. Lean production addresses all aspects of the manufacturing process, including design, the supply chain, and the manufacturing component. Similarly, lean construction addresses all aspects of the construction process, including design, supply chain management, and field operations. It considers in detail many subcategories in these general areas, such as safety, quality, and efficiency of field operations. The brief treatment of lean construction in this text will focus on managing the construction process. For a much more comprehensive understanding of lean principles applied to construction, the reader is referred to the Lean Construction Institute at leanconstruction.org. 147 148 6 Production Planning When focused on construction operations, the lean construction process begins with production planning prior to commencement of construction.

For building construction, similar problems must be resolved; however, since most building construction takes place in urban areas, additional questions need to be considered such as traffic and constrictions to urban thoroughfares. The planning should consider not only getting equipment and materials to the site but also offloading them from their conveyance in very tightly constricted areas. Supply chain management becomes a significant problem as construction projects increase in size and scope, in complexity, and in terms of schedules and budgets that continually become tighter. A thorough investigation of onsite and offsite utilities is necessary. Such needs as the closest rail siding and dock facility may play an important part in getting materials to the site.


pages: 223 words: 63,484

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky

centralized clearinghouse, index card, lone genius, market bubble, Merlin Mann, New Journalism, Results Only Work Environment, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, young professional

If you develop the capacity to organize yourself and those around you, you can beat the odds. Your Approach to Organization and the Destiny of Your Ideas Supply chain management is a heavily logistical aspect of business that seldom attracts much fanfare. Companies like Wal-Mart and Toyota are legendary for how well they distribute and manage inventory. There is no debate that the mechanics of a company—especially its supply chain management practices—help determine the costs, quality, and availability of the product. There are consulting firms and executive-level positions within companies dedicated entirely to managing the supply chain—the embodiment of organization within a company.

There are consulting firms and executive-level positions within companies dedicated entirely to managing the supply chain—the embodiment of organization within a company. At the same time, many of us don’t really associate such tasks with creativity and ideas. Since 2004, AMR Research, a leading authority on supply chain research that serves numerous Fortune 500 companies, has published an annual list of the twenty-five companies with the best supply chain management. You might be surprised to learn that Apple debuted on the list at No. 2 in 2007, and overtook companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota to take the No. 1 slot in 2008. Why would Apple, a company known for new ideas and its ability to “think different,” also be one of the most organized companies on the planet?

Tech Portfolio Post-it note Postrel, Virginia Priceline.com Prince-Ramus, Joshua prioritization Darwinian Energy Line and urgent vs. important tasks processing procrastination Procter & Gamble productivity, flexibility and progress project-centric vs. location-centric approaches project management breaking projects into primary elements meetings for plateaus and PSFK.com Publishers Lunch Purple Santa experiment R Randal, Jason RCRD LBL reactionary work flow Rebel Sell, The (Heath and Potter) Reboot Network recognition Red Bull Reed Space References chronological pile for discarding distinguishing Action Steps from filing labeling processing questioning Renoir, Pierre-Auguste responsibility grid restrictions rewards happiness as incremental play as recognition as short-term REX R/GA Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Rodriguez, Diego Rojas, Peter Rothstein, Jesse routines, work ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) Rutterford, Stephen S Sagmeister, Stefan sandbox environments San Francisco Chronicle Sawyer, Keith schedules, work School of Visual Arts Schorr, Max Schwartz, Barry Scientific American Mind self-awareness self-leadership backward clock contrarianism and deviants and entrepreneurship and failure and ambiguity and love and self-awareness in visionary’s narcissism and self-marketing self-reliance serendipity SETI Institute shipping Sisley, Alfred SixDegrees.com skepticism Slate.com social networks social power Southwest Airlines Spaces feature Spear, Josh Spence, Roy Spencer, Percy LeBaron Staple, Jeff Staple Design START/STOP/CONTINUE approach Steinhart Aquarium storytelling Stravinsky, Igor structure change and work routines Stutman, Randall Substance of Style, The (Postrel) Sun Microsystems supply chain management support Sutton, Robert T Tarter, Jill Taylor, James team wikis TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference Texas the99percent.com Thinc Design Thomas, Frank thrashing Threadless 3Com 3M Times Square Total Recall (Bell) Toyota transparency Trickey, Keith Truslow, Sam 21 Dinner Twitter two-minute rule U unique features urgent vs. important tasks V Vans Vimeo visionary’s narcissism visual organization W waiting waiting in line Walker Digital Wal-Mart Washington Post Weblogs, Inc.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

Games are another approach to communicating analytical results and models. They can be used to communicate how variables interact in complex relationships. For example, the “Beer Game,” a simulation based on a beer company’s distribution processes, was developed at MIT in the 1960s, and has been used by thousands of companies and students to teach supply chain management models and principles such as the “bullwhip effect”—the oscillation in order volumes resulting from poor information among supply chain participants. Other companies are beginning to develop their own games to communicate specific objectives. Trucking company Schneider National has developed a simulation-based game to communicate the importance of analytical thinking in dispatching trucks and trailers.

However, the same creative company employs rigorous processes and analytics in its supply chain operations to ensure that it has the right products at the right time for sale. In its Apple retail stores, for example, it collects and analyzes considerable amounts of data. One article reported, “Once a product goes on sale, the company can track demand by the store and by the hour, and adjust production forecasts daily.”1 An open job description for a supply chain management position at Apple requires, among other things, that the successful applicant “Must combine a working knowledge of world-class supply chain practices, strong analytical capabilities, and business savvy.”2 If even highly creative companies like Apple require analytical orientations in many of their employees, we’ll probably see many more combinations of creativity and analytics in the future.

The company has a very complex global supply chain, and doesn’t manufacture most of the products it sells. As Kevin Harrington, vice president of global business operations in Cisco’s Customer Value Chain Management organization put it: “Forecasting customer demand is, of course, a central part of supply chain management and a critical enabler of lean manufacturing. This discipline becomes ever more challenging in times like our own characterized by rapid changes in the macro-economy and volatile swings in supply and demand. In fact, Cisco’s need to write off some unused inventory [$2.25 billion worth] after the dotcom bust in 2001 provided some of the impetus for the larger transformation of our value chain.”10 The resulting project is a good illustration not only of analytical thinking, but of good relationships between quantitative analysts and business decision makers.


The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

An accompanying set of studies needs to examine what happens when social–technical systems are linked together to create new, larger systems in which significant data amplification effects occur. The technologies underpinning big data, and the data themselves through their relationality, are ripe for such scalings. Indeed, complex socio-technical assemblages, such as a large retailer like Walmart, are increasingly interconnecting various systems (e.g., supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, store management, and security systems) that generate forms of directed, automated and volunteered data to create complex and sophisticated data-driven organisations that have diverse consequences for suppliers, employees, and consumers.

Over the past 60 years information systems have thus become essential support infrastructures for all organisations of any size, enabling them to track and manage complex assemblages of people (staff, members, supporters, donors, customers), components, commodities and infrastructures across time and space, and enabling them to scale their operations from the local to the global (Castells 1996; Dicken 2003). Information systems allow an organisation to be run more intelligently, producing significant cost savings in their operational base. Three such data-driven information system that have been widely adopted are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply-chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These systems facilitate greater coordination and control within an organisation, and with other organisations and customers. ERP, for example, standardises and combines an organisation’s multiple databases and systems (relating to purchasing, warehousing, inventory, transport, marketing, accounting, personnel management and rostering, project management, customer relations) into one all-encompassing system that ensures that data and processes are automatically and seamlessly available from one part of a business to another (Dery et al. 2006; Grant et al. 2006).

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Washington, DC. http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0m2.pdf (last accessed 21 October 2013). Chignard, S. (2013) ‘A brief history of open data’, Paris Tech Review, 29 March, http://www.paristechreview.com/2013/03/29/brief-history-open-data/ (last accessed 18 September 2013). Chopra, S. and Meindl, P. (2012) Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning and Operation, 5th edition. Pearson, Harlow. Christensen, C.M. (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma. Harvard Business Review Press, Cambridge, MA. CIPPIC (2006) On the Data Trail: How Detailed Information About You Gets into the Hands of Organizations With Whom You Have No Relationship.


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

To ensure a steady source of supply from what was an unreliable source, Nestlé S.A. worked with these small farmers, providing them with tools and advice (e.g., on farming practices, helping them obtain pesticides and fertilizers) to help them create more successful crops. As the production quality from these small farmers improved, this increased the reliable supply of specialized coffee beans for Nestlé.28 Supply Chain Management Supply chain management is the process of matching demand for products with supply. This includes determining the amount of inventory to carry, handling product returns, and distributing products. If you are evaluating a business, such as a fashion or online retailer (e.g., Amazon.com), it is imperative that you learn how it manages its supply chain.

For example, what if a supplier runs out of product? What does the business do? You can often find articles written about the supply chain of a business or interviews written about supply chain managers in trade journals. For example, here are a few trade publications for operations and logistics management professionals: DC Velocity Commercial Carrier Journal Supply & Demand Chain Executive Supply Chain Digest World Trade Logistics Journal Logistics Today Supply Chain Management Review Logistics Management There are many articles in these publications that have been written about Li & Fung, Toyota, Starbucks, Nike, and Wal-Mart—all of which have strong supply chains.

See state-owned enterprises Sonkin, Paul sourcesevaluating interview locating of supplies Southwest Airlines balance sheet of speed of growth Spirit Airlines spreadsheet, tracking investments via Stahl, Jack stakeholders, benefitting Staples Starbucks state-owned enterprises (SOE) static ratios Stemberg, Thomas Stericycle sticky accounts stock awards, restricted stock options dilution, offsetting stock options employees managers and stock ownership required salary versus stock returns, employee relations and stock screens, using stock buying back financing acquisitions with management buying or selling transaction motivation strategic plans failure of long-term planning versus setting financial goals Strayer Education structural advantage subscription-type firms, metrics for substitute products, risks from Sun Microsystems Sunbeam suppliers dependence on innovation by relationship with supplies, sources of supply chain management sustainable competitive advantage finding business with structural switching costs synergy Sysco Tan, Seng Hock Taubman, Alfred tax purposes, selling stock for taxes, generally accepted accounting principles versus IRS technology price transparency and Tesco TEV. See total enterprise value theme parks, operating leverage Thiry, Kent Thomas, David Time Warner time, spent learning TJ Maxx Tommy Hilfiger total enterprise value (TEV) track record, manager’s trade associations trade journals Train, John trends, fads versus Tyco Tyler Corporation understanding, of acquired business Unilever University of Phoenix Urban Outfitters US Air UTI Worldwide Valkenaar, Lee valuation, as investment filter value creation, long-term Value Line values, business Van Cleef & Arpels variable costs Choice Hotels identifying Southwest Airlines VCA Antech Veer, Jeroen van de Viagra Volkswagen AG W.P.


pages: 116 words: 32,712

Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade by Roger Bate

global supply chain, interchangeable parts, RFID, Sam Peltzman, supply-chain management

Securing the supply chain includes making applications for drug wholesaler licenses more rigorous and increasing penalties—and enforcement power to impose these penalties—for counterfeiters. Communication channels among enforcement agencies—which in the United States are the FDA, the DEA, and customs—must also be streamlined. While many developing countries lack the regulatory structures and technical capacity for sophisticated supply-chain management and post-production drug safety POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS 69 schemes, reforms of the FDA and other national drug authorities in developed countries serve as models. Particularly in developed countries, policymakers should work to correct the worrisome asymmetry between the resources expended to ensure the safety of a drug before it is approved for distribution and those used to guarantee its quality after it goes to market.

Pfizer is one company that is doing this.41 Care must be taken, however, to strike a balance between preserving drug safety and promoting consumer-friendly competition. Purchasing directly from almost all manufacturers will likely add costs to the system—what James C. McAllister, editor of Pharmacy Times, describes as a “definite step backwards in supply chain management.”42 Pharmaceutical companies are also uniquely positioned to provide consultative assistance and the transfer of technology to improve supply chains in low-income nations. They should be prepared to do so for any country that unequivocally defends intellectual property rights. They can only make investments for training and other support in these countries, however, if they are able to tier their prices appropriately.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Trade finance is safe bet, as it provides a source of revenue that is independent of interest rates, provides cross-border payment fees, and has a low rate of default (up to 10 times lower than for traditional corporate lending (Accenture, 2016)). Together, supply chain management and trade finance provide market players with capital to produce and sell products and services within territories and across borders. However, in recent times, supply chain management and trade finance have come under increased scrutiny, which has resulted in processing delays and additional risks. Institutions are unsatisfied with the current trade finance instruments, as they involve relatively high fees, involve complex procedures, and entail large time delays owing to their dependence on paper documentation.

What is thus needed by governments is the definition of global standards, so that inventions like Ripple can work hand in hand with societal stakeholders to strengthen the fundamental principles and guide policy-making efforts. At an international scale, what is required is an ICANN-esque equivalent for the Blockchain. Trade Finance Trade is the oldest form of value exchange that human societies have engaged in. Today, the movement of goods across borders is carried out through supply chain management and trade finance. Supply chain deals with the processes that document the flow of goods from producer to consumer. It encompasses a wide range of procedures and structures that govern manufacturing, inventory management, and quality control. This involves a number of intermediaries and the transactions between them have to be documented to ensure the integrity of the trade process.

Payment protection insurance (PPI) Peer-to-peer (P2P) Personal identification number (PIN) Polycoin Popperian falsifiability Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) Public-key certificate (PKC) Public-key infrastructure (PKI) Q Quantitative easing (QE) Quantitative model R R3 CORDA™ Rational expectations Rational expectations structural models Rational expectations theory (RET) Rational expectations theory (RMT) RBCmodels SeeReal Business Cycle (RBC) models Reaganomics Real Business Cycle (RBC) models Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system Regular laws Ripple protocol S Santa Fe artificial stock market model Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Scalability SecureKey Concierge Seigniorage Shadow banking and systemic risk commercial banks definition dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models economic flexibility EMH and RET financial markets and monetary policy growth of financial products macroeconomic theories non-bank channels securitization trades Sharding Blockchain FinTech transformation global Fintech financing activity private sector ShoCard SIGEmodels SeeSticky Information General Equilibrium (SIGE) models Skill-biased technological change (SBTC) SkuChain Software as a service (SaaS) Sticky Information General Equilibrium (SIGE) models SWIFT network Systemically important financial institutions (SIFI) System identification number (SIN) T Tax evasion Tech-led firms Technology and invention accelerating consilience of technology blockchain combinatorial evolution complexity EDVAC equilibrium and rational expectations Konratiev waves Moore’s law and Wright’s law Popperian scientific method punch cards socialization specialised operations technological change Technology and invention socialization and complexity specialisation, diversity and ubiquity The Chicago Plan advantages benefits commercial banks debt feature existing debt fractional banking system monetary policies money principles and assumptions reduce private and public debt levels zero bound problem Too Big to Fail (TBTF) Bandits’ Club banking innovations CDS market derivative instruments endingTBTF approaches banking industry Dodd Frank Act goals and implementations innovative process Kashkari, Neel Living Will Review process optimal level questions systemically important financial institutions financial history fragmentation Gramm-Leach-Bliley financial modernization act ideological kidnapping macroeconomic models McFadden Act PPI process of technological innovations Trade finance automation banks and clients Blockchain capitalistic markets financial institutions limitations R3 CORDA™ regulators and policy makers supply chain management SWIFT network Wilson, Lamar Traditional structural models Tradle Transactional cost theory (TCT) Trunomi TUPAS U Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) acts Universal Basic Income (UBI) U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) US telecoms industry V Varoufakis, Yanis Vector auto regression (VAR) models W, X, Y, Z Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI) Wilson, Lamar


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

They may use data to guide their thinking, but they are just as likely to fall prey to a long list of self-delusions—everything from a sunk-cost bias to a confirmation bias (see below for a list of cognitive biases). One reason for Google’s success is that it is more ruthlessly data-driven than most other companies, right down to its hiring practices. In the same way that today we can no longer handle the complexities of air traffic control or supply chain management without algorithms, almost all the business insights and decisions of tomorrow will be data-driven. An analysis by the American Psychological Association of seventeen studies on hiring practices found that a simple algorithm beat intuitive hiring practices by more than 25 percent in terms of successful hires.

Remove anyone who puts his or her own career ahead of the success of the enterprise. 2. Partner with, Invest in or Acquire ExOs From 1990 to about 2005, there were at least five major disruptions in the retail or CPG industry. Three of them—EPOS systems with point-of-sale transactions, RFID tags for supply chain management, and customer loyalty cards—produced a significant amount of new data that fundamentally changed the industry. Marcus Shingles, a principal at Deloitte Consulting, and his research team spent most of 2012 helping the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association (GMA) analyze the CPG industry for potential Big Data innovation disruptions of the same magnitude.

Founded in June 2010 and focused on low-end Android smartphones, the company sold twenty million handsets in 2013, recording annual revenues of more than $5 billion. Lei Jun, one of the founders, is seen as a Chinese Steve Jobs. That’s not just because he’s been heavily inspired by Apple’s design, marketing and supply chain management, but also because of Xiaomi’s intense focus on performance, quality and customer experience—characteristics that Lei Jun wants to make available to everyone at affordable prices. Xiaomi offers a curated Apple smartphone experience with the software development, speed and processes of Google Android, all at a low price.


pages: 160 words: 45,516

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

This is similar in many ways to the role of the production manager in a manufacturing environment. The discipline of legal project management should, in my view, be built upon theory and experience from related management disciplines, such as logistics and supply-chain management. No doubt, the legal sector will come to develop its own sophisticated tools and techniques, such as ‘legal supply-chain management’ and ‘legal logistics’, which will be core subjects in future courses on legal project management. The ODR Practitioner With the advent of online dispute resolution (ODR—see Chapter 10) as a common mechanism for the settling of disagreements, there will be call for practitioners in this emerging field.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

As you watch these fan videos, you’ll encounter many intensely complex, custom-built variations. One such video replaces the doing column with a ready column divided into three sub-columns: cold, warm, and hot—allowing a more nuanced take on the status of pending tasks.7 Another video, recorded by a professor who teaches supply chain management, demonstrates a personal board format so complicated that it seems to require graduate training in supply chain management to even understand. He divides his options column into color-coded rows that he calls “value streams,” each dedicated to a different type of task and featuring Post-it notes of a matching color. These rows are further divided into internal columns.

His done column maintains the same color-coded value stream rows as his doing column, allowing him, at a quick glance, to get a sense of how he has recently been allocating his time.8 * * * — The success of Personal Kanban among productivity aficionados underscores an important reality for anyone looking to escape the hyperactive hive mind: task boards are not just effective for coordinating work among teams, but can be incredibly effective in making sense of your individual obligations—even if you don’t have graduate-level training in supply chain management. As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve embraced this idea in my own professional life as a professor, where I use Trello boards to keep track of my obligations during my time as the director of graduate studies (DGS) for the computer science department at Georgetown. Following Jim Benson’s basic structure, I have doing and done columns.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

This technology has the following traits: It does not involve robots, contrary to its name; It makes use of workflow and business rules technology; It is easily configured and modified by business users; It deals with highly repetitive and transactional tasks; It doesn’t learn or improve its performance without human modification; It typically interfaces with multiple information systems as if it were a human user; this is called “presentation layer” integration. Examples of settings in which this technology is popular include banking (for example, for back-office customer service tasks, such as replacing a lost ATM card), insurance (processing claims and payments), IT (monitoring system error messages and fixing simple problems), and supply chain management (processing invoices and responding to routine requests from customers and suppliers). There are substantial benefits from this type of automation, even though it is one of the less exotic forms of intelligent technology. Case studies compiled by process automation vendor Automation Anywhere suggest that 30 to 40 percent reductions in the cost and time to perform a process are not atypical.

The goal of the program was to create a new generation of leaders to revitalize American manufacturing; it addressed technical, managerial, and organizational perspectives on the field. Lawton then also got an MBA from MIT. He then worked at Hewlett-Packard in manufacturing, and at several startups in e-commerce and supply chain management. He’s still trying to revitalize manufacturing and feels strongly that Baxter and Sawyer, working closely with humans, can help in the effort. Marketers —Marketing is a particularly important function with automated systems and cognitive technologies, primarily because many people don’t understand them, and many of those who do are worried about them.

Dru, 160 Levy, Frank, 27, 63 Linton, Mike, 105 Lippershey, Hans, 59 Lloyd’s of London, 79, 221 López de Mántaras, Ramón, 54–55 Losey, Ralph, 132, 142–43, 145, 146 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 133 Luddite fallacy, 1 Luma Partners, 100 Lyman, Henry, 133 machine learning, 21, 37, 178 ensemble methods, 72 Malone, Mike, 6–7 Manjoo, Farhad, 41 manufacturing, 1, 2, 54 supply chain management, 48 textile industry, 132–33 marketing, 93 automated, 121–22, 128, 151, 183 balancing computer-based and human skills, 105 content marketing, 121–22 digital, 101–2 LUMAscapes, 100 Stepping Forward in, 183–85 by Zipcar, 101–2, 195 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Leaders for Manufacturing, 183 Media Lab, 235 Mayer, John, 113, 114, 116 McAfee, Andy, 6, 8, 27, 74 McDonough, Ryan, 116–17 McDonough, Will, 117 McGraw-Hill Education (MHE), 20, 86 McKinsey, 165 Global Institute report, 5 MD Anderson Cancer Center, 53, 209–10, 155, 215 medicine.


pages: 227 words: 32,306

Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize Roi by Lyndsay Wise

barriers to entry, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, the market place

Once we understand its value independently, we can look at how the OS market has shifted some of the available offerings and the general expectations of organizations. An introduction to BI Overall, the software industry provides a broad range of solutions to meet the needs of companies, ranging from transactional and supply chain management to customer relationship management (CRM) and project planning. Organizations apply a wide variety of software throughout their companies to manage their daily operations. Unfortunately, many of these solutions are implemented independently of one another and use different infrastructures that do not easily integrate with one another.

Within these categories, BI represents one area of OS. Looking at OS more broadly means identifying the fact that most, if not all, software has OS options. BI is not a new player in this arena. In fact, developers have been able to adopt OS solutions on a broad scale to include CRM, ERP, supply chain management, database development, etc. For some organizations this means having IT development teams design and deploy a wide range of OS solutions that are now passed off as homegrown business applications. One of the benefits of this approach remains that many OS offerings partner with one another to provide overall business-driven applications versus a best of breed or piecemeal approach.

Obviously, the perceived benefits are different depending on the goal of the BI project. In some cases, individualized projects may require a lot of customization anyway, meaning that companies will lean towards free software with broader development efforts. On the other hand, more traditional applications, such as sales and marketing dashboards, retail analysis, or supply chain management, are sure bets with out-of-thebox offerings. Business and technical requirements The past two chapters have broken down the factors on both business and technical levels, after providing an overview of both commercial and community options. In addition to the types of OSBI models and the factors that contribute to their selection, companies are tasked with identifying which model if any will suit the organization’s business challenges.


pages: 178 words: 52,637

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term by Torkell T. Eide, Lawrence A. Cunningham, Patrick Hargreaves

air freight, Albert Einstein, asset light, backtesting, barriers to entry, buy and hold, carbon tax, cashless society, cloud computing, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, global pandemic, haute couture, hindsight bias, legacy carrier, low cost airline, mass affluent, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, price elasticity of demand, proprietary trading, shareholder value, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, vertical integration

Also designed to bring order to credit markets, the industry’s stability and related barriers to entry are illustrated by the fact that it survived, basically intact, despite considerable rating errors in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. Such independent verification or testing services operate in many settings, such as financial auditing, supply chain management, and consumer product reviews. They offer particular value when risks of error are high, both from the direct consequences of failure – such as misallocated capital or injuries – and from the second-order effects of harm to reputation or legal liability. Such services may have even greater value when used by third-parties rather than the payer, as with both bond rating agencies and financial auditing.

Scale is essential. Success entails obtaining thousands of inputs from around the world coordinated in a complex fashion, at considerable cost. The model depends on continuous and rapid response to shifting demand, meaning understanding changing consumer preferences, having control of the supply chain, managing inventory effectively, and deftness in distribution. All this requires good designers, operation mavens, and synchronized information technology. Upstarts will struggle to do it all well. True, as technology and supply chain automation commoditizes, these business models may become more vulnerable.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Because supply chains link diverse players across vast distances who may not have any trusted personal relationships among them, they impose what managers call “one version of the truth,” the need for real-time and accurate data sharing so that everyone in the network can know where all things are at all times.14 Walmart’s CEO, Douglas McMillon, has said he runs a “tech company,” one that perpetually communicates sales and stock volume data digitally with suppliers like Procter & Gamble. Unilever constantly reads local demand conditions and taps into its global production system to more flexibly deliver goods across its markets. M.B.A. programs now consider supply chain management a core competency due to its high demand by employers in retail, defense, information technology (IT), and other sectors.15 Outside the boardroom, the movements of ordinary people in search of a better life are the best evidence that we have entered a supply chain world. In 1960, only 73 million people lived outside their country of origin; today the number of expatriates is 300 million and growing rapidly since the financial crisis.

Where such progressive evolution has not occurred, labor strikes have forced huge write-downs onto the balance sheets of mining and manufacturing companies, teaching them that caring for the supply chain and everyone along it is a sound long-term investment. The more supply chain interdependencies expand, the more true corporate citizenship emerges.*2 The paradox of the growing power of corporations is that even as their autonomy grows, their role as service providers does as well. Supply chain management has thus become a board-level issue, but expanding supply chain reach is viewed as a paradigm-shifting opportunity. Logistics operators such as Li & Fung and the largest retail conglomerates such as Unilever have modified their business models and delivery mechanisms to target the billions of people at the “bottom of the pyramid.”

John Gattorna, author of Dynamic Supply Chains, believes the very concept of supply chains should be renamed “value networks” for the widespread benefits they bring, such as adapting essential products to the price points of local markets, building infrastructure that benefits small businesses, and training and educating local workers. Stanford Business School’s Value Chain Innovation Initiative manages a growing library around the social, environmental, and other positive impacts of modifying supply chain management. *2 As the reputation-building guru Simon Anholt explains, companies initially sign up for corporate social responsibility projects for cynical reasons—buttressing their image—but eventually they realize that doing good is how to improve their image. Anholt calls this the “loophole in human nature


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

Sourcing production to its Monterrey facility and to other international suppliers would give Hershey “increased access to borderless sourcing [and] … further leverage the company’s manufacturing scale within a lower overall cost structure.”53 Hershey investors thought well of the strategy, as reflected in the company’s stock price, which outperformed the market consistently over the same period.54 By 2009 Lenny had successfully outsourced most of the production outlined in the strategy, closed six facilities in the United States and Canada, and let go an estimated 3,000 union workers. Hershey further upgraded its supply chain management system, moving cocoa beans, semiprocessed chocolate bars, and other ingredients to be made outside of the United States and Canada and reassembled and packaged by Hershey in a small number of U.S. facilities, where they could then be shipped from subcontracted distribution operations like those in Palmyra.

Even where work has traditionally been done by other suppliers, the need for greater coordination has increased as products have become more complex, quality standards more demanding, time-to-market demands tighter, and management of inventories more critical. In retailing, information technologies have also transformed arm’s-length supplier relationships, allowing retailers to manage an ever-growing scope of products while substantially reducing their exposure to inventory risk. Consequently, supply chain management results in the pressures that create fissured workplaces and their often deleterious impacts on the people working within them. This chapter focuses on supply chains as a form of fissured employment. The chapter starts by looking at how the core of supply chain operations—logistics—has been changed in distribution centers.

But in most cases to date, the FedEx position has been upheld: FedEx, as a branded, logistics juggernaut for which time to delivery is central to customer value, need not directly employ the workforce central to that mission. FedEx is not alone in its use of fissured workplace arrangements for logistics, the centerpiece of modern supply chains. More and more distribution centers are adopting an organizational form where third-party management has been married to subcontracting. Since supply chain management has elements that create many of the preconditions of the fissured workplace, the increasing use of subcontracting and temporary staffing companies within logistics can be considered fissuring on top of fissuring—fissuring squared. Lean Retailing and the Modern Distribution Center Like lean manufacturing, lean retailing takes advantage of information technologies, automation, industry standards, and management innovations to align orders from suppliers more closely with what consumers are buying in the store (rather than what purchasing agents, months in advance, think consumers might buy).


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Thus, planning, and above all trust, openness and cooperation along the supply chain—rather than competition—are fundamental to continuous replacement. This is not the “kumbaya” analysis of two socialist writers; even the most hard-hearted commerce researchers and company directors argue that a prerequisite of successful supply chain management is that all participants in the chain recognize that they all will gain more by cooperating as a trusting, information-sharing whole than they will as competitors. The seller, for example, is in effect telling the buyer how much he will buy. The retailer has to trust the supplier with restocking decisions.

The same phenomenon occurs in retail as much as it does manufacturing (and manufacturing is merely another link within the retail supply chain anyway), with Toyota being one of the first firms to implement intra- and inter-firm information visibility through its Walmart-like “Kanban” system, although the origin of this strategy dates as far back as the 1940s. While Walmart was pivotal in development of supply chain management, there are few large companies that have not copied its practices via some form of cross–supply chain visibility and planning, extending the planning that happens within a firm very widely throughout the capitalist “marketplace.” Nevertheless, Walmart may just be the most dedicated follower of this “firmification” of supply chains.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

If the global economy is to transition successfully into a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of all the cutting edge business models, including open-source and networked commerce, distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply chain management. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP The collaborative nature of the new economy is fundamentally at odds with classical economic theory, which puts great store on the assumption that individual self-interest in the marketplace is the only effective way to drive economic growth. The Third Industrial Revolution model also eschews the kind of centralized command and control associated with traditional Soviet-style socialist economies.

(Arnold Toynbee, the acclaimed British historian, first popularized the concept of the “Industrial Revolution” in a series of lectures he delivered in the late 1880s, well after the First Industrial Revolution was underway.39) Today, we are witnessing the convergence of a new communications media and energy regime—a Third Industrial Revolution. Businesses across widely divergent fields—clean energies, green construction, telecommunications, micro-generation, distributed grid IT, plug-in electric and fuel cell transport, sustainable chemistry, nanotechnology, zero-carbon logistics and supply-chain management, and so on—are developing an array of new technologies, products, and services. Until recently, these new commercial opportunities have attracted only modest interest in the investment community and with the public at large. That’s because we human beings live by stories, and stories are always about the relationships and interactions between characters.

Yellen, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, took note of the trend, pointing out that the GDP remained unchanged in the four quarters of 2009, but payrolls declined by 4 percent. In other words, companies increased their output per worker by 4 percent.3 New efficiencies in supply chain management accounted for much of this increase in productivity. Nowhere is the disconnect between productivity gains and job losses greater than in manufacturing. In the period between 1995 and 2002, more than thirty-one million manufacturing jobs disappeared in the twenty largest economies, while productivity rose by 4.3 percent and global industrial production increased by 30 percent.4 The reality is that manufacturers can produce more goods with fewer workers.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Smart shelf technology: “The Future of Retail: Shopping and the Smart Shelf,” Intel. See: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/retail/digital-retail-futurecasting-report.html. Back in 2015, a Cisco study found that IoT solutions: Andrew Meola, “How IoT Logistics Will Revolutionize Supply Chain Management,” Business Insider, December 21, 2016. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-logistics-supply-chain-management-2016-10. The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are Coming The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are Coming: Daniel Faggella, “Artificial Intelligence In Retail—10 Present and Future Use Cases,” Emerj.com, March 28, 2019. See: https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/artificial-intelligence-retail/.

The innovation deters theft, automates restocking, and ensures that inventory is always in the right spot. Today, Intel’s version has a screen built into the shelf. Tomorrow, smart shelves will be AI-enhanced and capable of conversation. Is the sweater you’re holding dry clean only? Just ask the shelf. Perhaps the biggest shift in retail will be one of efficiency, especially in supply chain management. Back in 2015, a Cisco study found that IoT solutions will have more than a $1.9 trillion impact on this sector, and for good reason. AI can detect patterns in data that humans cannot. This means that every link in the supply chain—inventory levels, supplier quality, demand forecasting, production planning, transportation management, and more—is being revolutionized.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Over 35 million people per year work under coercion: “Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour,” International Labour Office, 2014. labor is responsible for some $150 billion in profits: Ibid. Sex slaves . . . less than a quarter: Stefan Gold, Alexander Trautrim, and Zoe Trodd, “Modern slavery challenges to supply chain management,” Supply Chain Management 20 (2015). what they called a “strategic vetting process”: The following depiction of the Humanity United process was compiled with help from Lori Bishop, Brian Edge, Katrina Nakamura. the Guardian leverage the Humanity United report to publish their own massive exposé: Kate Hodal, Chris Kelly, and Felicity Lawrence, “Revealed: Asian Slave Labor Producing Prawns for Supermarkets in US, UK,” The Guardian, June 10, 2014.

In the next audit, it needs to be 32 inches”—that was eventually resolved by hiring a former auditor as a consultant who recommended the factory “install two hooks and rotate the extinguisher back-and-forth.” Your private sector at work! Sonali Rammohan, “Toward a More Responsible Supply Chain: The HP Story,” Supply Chain Management Review, July 2009; Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). A date is set. Inspection questions previewed: As hinted in the text, the conflicts of interest here are truly impressive.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

But as these innovation strategies diffused more broadly across organizations, their mastery stopped being a source of differentiation and became, instead, simply an operational requirement for getting in the game. Today we are witnessing another transition point. The enormous benefits that accrued to firms who mastered supply chain management—global procurement, just-in-time-production, lean inventory management—are still real, but they are now widely shared. In industry after industry, we see a major change taking place as firms shift from using supply chains to offer better products to embracing partnerships and collaboration to offer better “solutions.”

See Sony Reader portable music players, 140–42 3-D TV, 53 Sony Discman, 142 Sony Pressman, 141 Sony Reader, 90–95 and Connect.com, 90, 93 Data Discman Reader, 88–89 failure, reasons for, 3, 93–95, 99–100, 178 features of, 90–91 in Japan, failure of, 90 versus Kindle, 96–97, 99–100 value blueprint, 91–95 value proposition, 90–91 Sony Walkman, early-mover advantage, 140–41 Sortais, Thierry, 17 Spectrum rights, 41, 42 Staged expansion, 199–205 goals of, 194 iPhone, 216–17 iPod, 208–10 M-PESA, 199–205 Stringer, Sir Howard, 90 Superabrasive grinding wheels, 59–61 benefits of, 59–60 costs versus benefits problem, 60–61 Suppliers supply chain, managing, 8–9 supply chain focus, 84 in value blueprint, 85 T Tachikawa, Keiji, 41 Technology innovations ecosystem, necessity of, 52 timing as crucial, 147, 154–56 See also specific areas/products Telecine scanner, 67 Television HDTV, Philips failure, 3, 53 3-D, 53 Tesla Roadster, 170 Thomsen, Mads Krogsgaard, 107 3-D technology films, 74, 76 television, 53 3G mobile technology capabilities of, 40–42 co-innovation needs, 42 corporate expectations, 41–42 execution risk, 45–46 handsets, complexity of, 42–43 market, beginning of, 52 network, first, 41 Nokia 3G phone failure, 42–46, 52–53 spectrum rights, 41, 42 Timing and adoption chain risk, 77 Apple success, 144–45, 147, 208–9, 211 blind spot, 140 and co-innovation, 51, 53–54 and early movers, 140–55 ecosystem construction sequence, 193–223 payback and leadership, 117, 136 smart timing, elements of, 155–57 and technology products, 147, 154–56 Tires, automobile markets for, 25–26 run-flat.


pages: 757 words: 193,541

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

Rather than meeting individually with customers to understand future capacity requirements, their forecasts can be collected via a web user interface or an API. For example, if you provide a service to hundreds of other teams, forecasting can be become a full-time job for a project manager; alternatively, it can be very little work with proper automation that integrates with the company’s supply-chain management system. • Evaluating new technology can be labor intensive, but if a common case is identified, the end-to-end process can be turned into an assembly-line process and optimized. For example, if hard drives are purchased by the thousand, it is wise to add a new model to the mix only periodically and only after a thorough evaluation.

Find ways to streamline the actual rack and burn-in. • Manage your time. Make it a priority to install new equipment the moment it arrives. Have no idle hardware. Alternatively, dedicate staff to doing this. Hire non-system administrators (“technicians”) to unbox and rack mount systems. • Work with vendors (supply chain management) to reduce ordering time. • Place many smaller orders rather than one huge order. This improves parallelism of the system. Vendors may be able to chop up one big order into periodic deliveries and monthly billing. A transition from one huge order every 6 months to 6 monthly orders and deliveries may have billing, capital cost, and labor benefits

A metric uses that data to measure a quantifiable component of performance. This is the stuff of Chapters 16, 17, and 19. • Capacity Planning (CP): Determining future resource needs. Capacity planning involves the technical work of understanding how many resources are needed per unit of growth, plus non-technical aspects such as budgeting, forecasting, and supply chain management. This is the stuff of Chapter 18. • Change Management (CM): Managing how services are purposefully changed over time. This includes the service delivery platform and how it is used to create, deliver, and push into production new application and infrastructure software. This includes firmware upgrades, network changes, and OS configuration management


pages: 244 words: 76,192

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy

Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, business process, complexity theory, financial engineering, Iridium satellite, Long Term Capital Management, megaproject, NetJets, old-boy network, shareholder value, six sigma, social software, Socratic dialogue, supply-chain management

Determining that some of an organization’s high performers can’t handle the challenges of a new strategic future is a difficult social process—who wants to tell good people they aren’t capable of moving to the next level? But it has to be done, and the kind of people process we are describing forces leaders to put these questions on the table. Linking people, strategy, and operations also helps distill organizational challenges for the coming year. XYZ needs to improve supply-chain management, a crucial skill when selling services to an installed base. Besides new talent, this will require elevating aftermarket to a P&L center reporting directly to the president, so that it will have the focus and accountability it needs. Strategy Become the premier global provider of XYZ systems to a multiple class of customers.

As one example, let’s look at Susan James, a marketing vice president who was identified as a high-potential person in the Leadership Assessment Summary. Her 2001 performance highlights included developing both the aftermarket strategy for the new solutions-selling environment, and the marketing and profit-improvement strategy for the European market. Her 2002 challenges include continued execution of the aftermarket strategy, especially supply chain management. While she’s customer focused and knows the industry and its products, she still has important development needs. She has to work on building teams through coaching, and she has to move to upgrade the skills of weak performers, especially those serving the European market. Since there will be significant new hiring for the solutions-selling program, she has to make sure she effectively integrates new people.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The overflowing street-side cafés of Lahore and Karachi represent the onset of what the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid describes as “infinite demand.” E-commerce is also growing along with 4G and broadband connectivity. Alibaba launched a national AliExpress.com shopping site for Pakistan in 2017. The Hong Kong–based global supply chain manager Li & Fung is a superb proxy for South Asia’s thriving logistics and retail sectors. In the words of the company’s CFO, Spencer Fung, the company’s size makes it a “bowling ball amidst grains of sand.” As Li & Fung shifts from simple wage arbitrage (cost optimization) toward geographic arbitrage (speed optimization), it is becoming ever more a global company first and a Chinese company second.

Rajendra Pawar, a cofounder of India’s private education powerhouse NIIT, has scaled his on-site and online industry-linked skills programs to reach 500,000 students per year, training them on demand for Indian and global companies from oil rigs to tech parks, with curricular offerings expanding to service insurance, supply-chain management, programming, and other sectors. After completing one assignment, a student can return to be retrained for the next one. Hence NIIT’s motto, which embodies the spirit of lifelong learning: “Anadi Anant” (Without beginning, without end). East Asians are doing the best at preparing youth for an uncertain professional landscape.

The growing adoption of 3D printing for designing and producing auto components, medical devices, and various consumer products on a large scale might replace large volumes of goods mass-manufactured in Asia and reimported to the United States and Europe. But since most such goods are sold in Asia anyway, more and more companies are positioning these technologies as much abroad as at home. The San Francisco–based Flex (formerly Flextronics), one of the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated supply-chain managers, is deploying advanced design and tailored manufacturing solutions for clients ranging from Cisco Systems to Nike—especially in Asia, where the customers are. Not only are Americans selling in Asia, but their travel as professionals and tourists to Asia helps US companies as well. As Asian consumption of entertainment surges, American pop singers, rock bands, and sports teams spend weeks touring Asia, selling out stadiums.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

These criminal enterprises go to great lengths to ensure their sustainability and as such are almost exclusively located in jurisdictional safe havens, places with weak governments, unstable political regimes, and police forces willing to look the other way, for a fee of course. Within these criminal syndicates, there are divisions of labor, supply chain management, department heads, outside consultants, and team deliverables. To understand the power and professionalism of Crime, Inc., we must first and foremost take a look at its org chart in order to deconstruct the modern criminal organization. Here are the most common roles and responsibilities based on undercover research: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER The CEO of any criminal enterprise is responsible for decision making and overseeing operations.

ATTORNEY FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK Whether organized cyber-crime groups structure themselves along the lines of corporations, such as Innovative Marketing, or more nimble self-assembling swarms, one thing is clear: they are deeply sophisticated in their approach to business and their “customers.” They have appropriated the latest legitimate corporate strategies and are well versed in supply chain management, global logistics, creative financing, just-in-time manufacturing, workforce incentivization, and consumer needs analysis. The result is the modern cyber-crime enterprise, a full-service, multiproduct, highly profitable global organization capable of taking down any individual, company, or government at will.

…‘If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost.’ ” Ashton’s concept was both simple and powerful and had a major impact on manufacturers and retailers like Walmart, dramatically improving their supply chain management and cutting costs for consumers. Back in 1999, however, the technology did not exist to make the IoT a reality outside very controlled environments, such as factory warehouses. Today that has changed, and a confluence of developments has come together to enable major leaps forward in the world of ubiquitous computing, allowing for the first time the widespread “embedding of miniature computers in objects and connecting them to the Internet using wireless technology.”


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

Yet, the firms that offered these services would be defined as passive, simply because their employees were unarmed and too high-level to be wasted on the battlefield. This division also counterintuitively lumps firms that offer military officers for hire or provide training in offensive military doctrine along with those that offer logistics or supply-chain management. The services obviously differ, but the passive/active distinction does not recognize why. The final problem is that the active/passive, private security/militarv monikers are really normative determinations within an economically mo- tivated setting. For good reason, no other industry classifies its sectors this way, as the categorization typically degenerates into a biased way of distinguishing the "good" passive/private security firms from the "bad" active/ private military firms.

MILITARY SUPPORT FIRMS Firms that provide supplementary military sendees characterize the third sector of the industry. These privatized functions, include nonlethal aid and assistance, including logistics, intelligence, technical support supply, and transportation. As with what has occurred with supply-chain management in general industry, the benefit of this type of military outsourcing is that these firms specialize in secondary tasks not part of the overall core mission of the client. Thus, they are able to build capabilities and efficiencies that a client military cannot sustain. The client's own military, in turn, can concentrate on its primary business of fighting.

BRS augmented U.S. forces in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and most recently secured a $1 billion dollar contract in support of KFOR in Kosovo.33 This last figure illustrates that firm revenue tend to grow in size as one moves up the industry typology. Other military support sector firms include Boeing Services, Holmes, and Narver. Parallels of general support sector firms include companies such as Marriott-Sodexho that offers institutional facilities management and, of course, general supply-chain management firms that many military support sector firms are modeled after. The military's core task is generally perceived as combat, so it is far from surprising that the primary areas for support sector firms has been in the more mundane combat support sectors. Although it was once seen as unsuitable for privatization, the military logistics role—transporting and supplying the troops on the battlefield—has been notable for the extent of this sort of privatization.


The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch by Thomas Thwaites

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, global supply chain, invisible hand, lateral thinking, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

I’m still hopeful that I’ll see some toast when I up the voltage, or use white bread instead of the whole wheat I’ve tried so far. Toast. Has that really been my goal for the last nine months? In one way, yes. But in another more accurate way, no. I wanted to get under the skin of the slick-looking objects that surround us, but don’t really come from anywhere (unless you work in supply chain management). To the average consumer (like me) a toaster begins its life on display in a shop, waiting for you or someone to buy it. To pay £3.94 for a toaster that’s “from a shop” seems vaguely reasonable, but £3.94 for a toaster that is entirely made from stuff that a few months ago was rocks and sludge distributed in giant holes all over the world, then brought together in an elaborate series of processes and exchanges, gradually assembled by many people, wrapped, and boxed and then somehow shipped to that shop, which is heated and lit and has people being paid to assist you in your purchase: Somehow £3.94 for all of this doesn’t seem to quite add up.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Founded in 1972, it had, by 1996, more than 9,000 of its enterprise software systems installed at companies around the world.18 These big systems had one application each to keep track of financial, accounting, customer, materials, and other information and to help with reporting, planning, and forecasting in areas such as finance, marketing, supply-chain management, and other important functions. Unfortunately, as the applications flourished and multiplied, each came to have its own database, making it difficult to search across applications to find, for example, all the information that might be needed pertaining to a particular customer. The rise of the Internet—and the advent of new ways of organizing software, called service-oriented architectures (SOAs)—posed an opportunity for SAP.

The challenge for institutional leaders is how to embrace and broaden the application of these edge technologies without, at least initially, directly challenging the core technology platforms of the firm. One of the most promising opportunities for applying these new social-media technologies in the near term lies in the area of exception handling. It turns out that a substantial portion of employee time in supply-chain management, sales, and customer service is devoted to handling exceptions that the automated enterprise IT platforms cannot process. We’re not talking about, for example, entering an address with the numbers transposed in a ZIP code. We’re talking about a broad range of situations where the needs of the participants fall outside of currently defined policies and protocols even if no “error” has occurred.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Firms can invest in intangible capital; indeed, when technology is changing rapidly they must: new technologies create the possibility of doing things far more effectively, but to take advantage of that possibility the firm must learn new ways of doing things. The time required to build that intangible capital accounts for part of the delay we observe between the arrival of a powerful new technology – such as supply-chain management software – and the productivity dividend that technology eventually generates. To use the software well firms needed to hire new workers with complementary skills. They needed to invest in equipment, including computers and scanners, to track inventory. They needed to bring suppliers into the system and train all the workers involved on how to use the new software.

Ray labour abundance as good problem bargaining power cognitive but repetitive collective bargaining and demographic issues discrimination and exclusion global growth of workforce and immigration liberalization in 1970s/80s ‘lump of labour’ fallacy occupational licences organized and proximity reallocation to growing industries retraining and skill acquisition and scarcity and social value work as a positive good see also employment Labour Party, British land scarcity Latvia Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine legal profession Lehman Brothers collapse (2008) Lepore, Jill liberalization, economic (from 1970s) Linkner, Josh, The Road to Reinvention London Lucas, Robert Lyft maker-taker distinction Malthus, Reverend Thomas Manchester Mandel, Michael Mankiw, Gregory marketing and public relations Marshall, Alfred Marx, Karl Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism (2015) McAfee, Andrew medicine and healthcare ‘mercantilist’ world Mercedes Benz Mexico Microsoft mineral industries minimum wage Mokyr, Joel Monroe, President James MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) Moore, Gordon mortality rates Mosaic (web browser) music, digital nation states big communities of affinity inequality between as loci of redistribution and social capital nationalist and separatist movements Netherlands Netscape New York City Newsweek NIMBYism Nordic and Scandinavian economies North Carolina North Dakota Obama, Barack oil markets O’Neill, Jim Oracle Orbán, Viktor outsourcing Peretti, Jonah Peterson Institute for International Economics pets.com Philadelphia Centennial Fair (1876) Philippines Phoenix, Arizona Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) Poland political institutions politics fractionalization in Europe future/emerging narratives geopolitical forces human wealth narrative left-wing looming upheaval/conflict Marxism nationalist and separatist movements past unrest and conflict polarization in USA radicalism and extremism realignment revolutionary right-wing rise of populist outsiders and scarcity social membership battles Poor Laws, British print media advertising revenue productivity agricultural artisanal goods and services Baumol’s Cost Disease and cities and dematerialization and digital revolution and employment trilemma and financial crisis (2008) and Henry Ford growth data in higher education of highly skilled few and industrial revolution minimum wage impact paradox of in service sector and specialization and wage rates see also factors of production professional, technical or managerial work and education levels and emerging economies the highly skilled few and industrial revolution and ‘offshoring’ professional associations skilled cities professional associations profits Progressive Policy Institute property values proximity public spending Putnam, Robert Quakebot quantitative easing Race Against the Machine, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011) railways Raleigh, North Carolina Reagan, Ronald redistribution and geopolitical forces during liberal era methods of nation state as locus of as a necessity as politically hard and societal openness wealth as human rent, economic Republican Party, US ‘reshoring’ phenomenon Resseger, Matthew retail sector retirement age Ricardo, David rich people and maker-taker distinction wild contingency of wealth Robinson, James robots Rodrik, Dani Romney, Mitt rule of law Russia San Francisco San Jose Sanders, Bernie sanitation SAP Saudi Arabia savings glut, global ‘Say’s Law’ Scalia, Antonin Scandinavian and Nordic economies scarcity and labour political effects of Schleicher, David Schwartz, Anna scientists Scotland Sears Second World War secular stagnation global spread of possible solutions shale deposits sharing economies Silicon Valley Singapore skilled workers and education levels and falling wages the highly skilled few and industrial revolution ‘knowledge-intensive’ goods and services reshoring phenomenon technological deskilling see also professional, technical or managerial work Slack (chat service) Slate (web publication) smartphone culture Smith, Adam social capital and American Constitution baseball metaphor and cities ‘deepening’ definition/nature of and dematerialization and developing economies and erosion of institutions of firms and companies and good government and housing wealth and immigration and income distribution during industrial revolution and liberalization and nation-states productive application of and rich-poor nation gap and Adam Smith and start-ups social class conflict middle classes and NIMBYism social conditioning of labour force working classes social democratic model social reform social wealth and social membership software ‘enterprise software’ products supply-chain management Solow, Robert Somalia South Korea Soviet Union, dissolution of (1991) specialization Star Trek state, role of steam power Subramanian, Arvind suburbanization Sweden Syriza party Taiwan TaskRabbit taxation telegraphy Tesla, Nikola Thatcher, Margaret ‘tiger’ economies of South-East Asia Time Warner Toyota trade China as ‘mega-trader’ ‘comparative advantage’ theory and dematerialization global supply chains liberalization shaping of by digital revolution Adam Smith on trade unions transhumanism transport technology self-driving cars Trump, Donald Twitter Uber UK Independence Party United States of America (USA) 2016 Presidential election campaign average income Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) Constitution deindustrialization education in employment in ethno-nationalist diversity of financial crisis (2008) housing costs in housing wealth in individualism in industrialization in inequality in Jim Crow segregation labour scarcity in Young America liberalization in minimum wage in political polarization in post-crisis profit rates productivity boom of 1990s real wage data rising debt levels secular stagnation in shale revolution in social capital in and social wealth surpasses Britain as leading nation wage subsidies in university education advanced degrees downward mobility of graduates MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) and productivity see also education urbanization utopias, post-work Victoria, Queen video-gamers Virginia, US state Volvo Vox wages basic income policy Baumol’s Cost Disease cheap labour and employment growth and dot.com boom and financial crisis (2008) and flexibility and Henry Ford government subsidies and housing costs and immigration and industrial revolution low-pay as check on automation minimum wage and productivity the ‘reservation wage’ as rising in China rising in emerging economies and scarcity in service sector and skill-upgrading approach stagnation of and supply of graduates Wandsworth Washington D.C.


pages: 134 words: 29,488

Python Requests Essentials by Rakesh Vidya Chandra, Bala Subrahmanyam Varanasi

business logic, create, read, update, delete, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, natural language processing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, supply-chain management, web application

[ ix ] Interacting with the Web Using Requests Reading data and obtaining information from web services tends to be a crucial task in these modern days. Everyone knows how an Application Programming Interface (API) allowed Facebook to spread the use of the Like button all over the Web and dominated the field of social communication. It has got its own flair to influence the business development, product development and supply chain management. At this stage, learning an efficient way to deal with the API's and opening the web URLs is the need of the hour. This will greatly affect many processes of web development. Introduction to HTTP request Whenever our Web browser tries communicating with a Web server, it is done by using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which functions as a request-response protocol.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Inspired by blockchains but eschewing that label, R3’s Corda platform is built to comply with banks’ business and regulatory models while streamlining trillions of dollars in daily interbank securities transfers. The non-finance corporate world is also getting engaged. Hyperledger is a distributed ledger/blockchain-design consortium looking to develop standardized, open-source versions of the technology for businesses to use in areas such as supply-chain management. Coordinated by the Linux Foundation, it brings together the likes of IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Digital Asset Holdings, a digital ledger startup led by former J.P. Morgan powerhouse Blythe Masters. One mark of the business world’s enthusiasm is seen in the trajectory of media company CoinDesk’s Consensus conference, the marquee annual event for businesses interested in blockchain technology.

Yet, unintentionally, he was also showing how the legacy business interests of an influential member could distract an open-source consortium like Hyperledger from building a truly open, innovative system. It soon became clear that the business opportunity IBM saw was to steer clients, particularly those eager to resolve supply-chain management problems, back to its own legacy businesses. A year later, IBM launched its “Blockchain as a Service” offering—marked by the first TV ad to use the word “blockchain.” The service encouraged clients to work with their supply-chain partners to create private blockchains that were structured entirely around an integration with IBM’s pre-existing cloud service.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

His huge, muscular frame towered over Sunny. “God damn it, we are working our asses off,” he growled. Sunny backed off and apologized. * * * — SUNNY WAS a tyrant. He fired people so often that it gave rise to a little routine in the warehouse downstairs. John Fanzio, the affable supply-chain manager, worked down there, and it had become the trusted place where employees came to vent or gossip. Every few days, Edgar Paz, the head of Theranos’s security team, would come down with a mischievous look on his face, a badge hidden in his hand. At the sight of him, John and the logistics team would gather in excitement, knowing what was coming.

As Paz drew closer, he would slowly spin the badge from its necklace and reveal the face on the front, eliciting gasps of surprise. It was Sunny’s latest victim. John had become good friends with Greg, Jordan, Trey, and Ted. Together, the five of them formed a little island of sanity at the company. John was probably the only strategic supply-chain manager in the Bay Area who worked just feet away from the cold roll-up door of the loading dock, but he liked it because it kept him away from Sunny’s scrutiny and his obsessive focus on the number of hours people worked. Unfortunately, working in the warehouse is what eventually brought about John’s own demise.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

Offices in all real economies, plus more than twenty recognized tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, enable them to orchestrate the great cross-border tax-dodging game.36 They are expert in each place’s tax laws, as well as the overarching international rules, and can easily spot the loopholes and gaps in this patchwork. Tax scheming designed by the Big Four now stretches as far as the wholesale reorganization of multinational business, usually under the euphemism of ‘tax-efficient supply-chain management’. This involves carefully carving it up into profitable and less profitable parts, parking the former somewhere tax-friendly. At a 2008 International Fiscal Association conference in New Delhi, an Ernst & Young partner set out the plan. ‘Centralization of management, control and business risks’ (the profitable part) would be ‘located in low tax jurisdiction’.

Paul Gillis, visiting professor of accounting at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, quoted in Dinny McMahon and Michael Rapoport, ‘Challenges Auditing Chinese Firms’, Wall Street Journal, 12 July 2011. 35. Luxembourg Leaks: Global Companies’ Secrets Exposed, https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks. 36. Lawrie Holmes and Alex Hawkes, ‘Big Four Auditors “Embedded in Offshore World”’, Financial Mail, 29 January 2011. 37. Tax Efficient Supply Chain Management and Transfer Pricing, presentation by Srinivasa Rao, partner, Ernst & Young, International Fiscal Association conference, 13 December 2008. 38. Proposal to work with Heineken on the design and implementation of a new group purchasing company, September 2010, PriceWaterhouse Coopers LLP, https://docs.google.com/viewer?


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Boeing might gain in efficiency by outsourcing its production processes, but that outsourcing also means that events in a dozen countries across three continents have the power to disrupt its operations. The successful assembly of a plane now depends not just on a few factories’ remaining intact, but on safe passage across oceans, acceptable labor conditions in Japan, a lack of natural disasters in Sweden, stable exchange rates, and flexible supply chain management. In Iraq, we encountered unprecedented levels of disruption. An operation on one side of the country would spontaneously incite reactions from a cell on the other that we did not even know existed; one misstep of ours or one piece of effective AQI propaganda could make the social media rounds and spark riots within hours; one video of a militant attack would have an immediate effect on insurgent recruitment numbers and sectarian reprisals, and all of these events happened almost every day

This is much harder when you are trying to achieve something constructive: AQI could dole out empowerment with relatively little shared consciousness because, with destruction as their primary goal, precision and coordination were not always necessary; but for most human endeavors struggling to come to terms with a complex environment—everything from supply chain management to aid distribution to marketing to national governance—doing something constructive is essential to their mission. Empowered execution without shared consciousness is dangerous. Similarly, shared consciousness on its own, as we learned, is powerful but ultimately insufficient. Building holistic awareness and forcing interaction will align purpose and create a more cohesive force, but will not unleash the full potential of the organization.


pages: 379 words: 113,656

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

Highly optimized tolerance: A mechanism for power laws in designed systems. Physical Review E, 60(2), 1412–1427 (1999). CHAPTER NINE: INNOVATION, ADAPTATION, AND RECOVERY The Toyota-Aisin Crisis The account of the Toyota-Aisin crisis on which my description is based is Nishiguchi, T., and Beaudet, A. Fractal design: Self-organizing links in supply chain management. In Von Krogh, G., Nonaka, I., and Nishiguchi, T. (eds.), Knowledge Creation: A Source of Value (Macmillan, London, 2000). Another paper about the remarkable Toyota group that guided our thinking on innovation is Ward, A., Liker, J. K., Cristiano, J. J., and Sobek, D. K. The second Toyota paradox: How delaying decisions can make better cars faster.

Renormalization group analysis of the small-world network model. Physics Letters A, 263, 341–346 (1999). Newman, M. E. J., Watts, D. J., and Strogatz, S. H. Random graph models of social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, 2566–2572 (2002). Nishiguchi, T., and Beaudet, A. Fractal design: Self-organizing links in supply chain management. In Von Krogh, G., Nonaka, I., and Nishiguchi, T. (eds.) Knowledge Creation: A New Source of Value (Macmillan, London, 2000). Noelle-Neumann, E. Turbulences in the climate of opinion: Methodological applications of the spiral of silence theory. Public Opinion Quarterly, 41(2), 143–158 (1977).


pages: 133 words: 42,254

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money by Frank J. Ohlhorst

algorithmic trading, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, create, read, update, delete, data acquisition, data science, DevOps, extractivism, fault tolerance, information security, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Network effects, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, RFID, sentiment analysis, six sigma, smart meter, statistical model, supply-chain management, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application

In-memory technology further benefits enterprises because it allows for greater specificity of information, so that the data elements are personalized to both the customer and the business user’s individual needs. That allows a particular department or line of business to self-service specific needs whose results can trickle up or down the management chain, affecting account executives, supply chain management, and financial operations. Customer teams can combine different sets of data quickly and easily to analyze a customer’s past and current business conditions using in-memory technology from almost any location, ranging from the office to the road, on their mobile devices. This allows business users to interact directly with customers using the most up-to-date information; it creates a collaborative situation in which business users can interact with the data directly.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

When the hedge-funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after the ‘event’, I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply-chain management, sustainability efforts and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an ‘event’ in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied towards less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now. They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it.


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

To eliminate this overcapacity, demand had to rise or investment had to fall until “the two levels cross, or the investments of the past several years have been obsoleted [sic]” by new technology. “Both of these require some time.” Grove went on to discuss the specific problem that caused such mayhem: “The viciousness of the down cycle was made more so by all the [supply-chain management software]. It blew through the supply-chain in a much faster ripple than previous cycles. Nothing in supply-chain management can read minds. End demand is what end demand is.”21 Greenspan’s productivity gains, if they existed at all, including the “Internet and electronic interface systems” that had prompted the “viciousness of the down cycle,” since they are machines programmed by people, and the machines cannot read minds. 17 Ibid., p. 123. 18 Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, “Federal Reserve Board’s Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress,” February 13, 2001. 19 Gerard Baker, “Greenspan Sees a Quick Rebound,” Financial Times, February, 14, 2001. 20“Intel CoFounder Sees No Quick Turnaround,” “Technology Briefing: Hardware,” New York Times, March 7, 2001. 21 William A.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Industrial Operations—The Factory of Things The global plant floor needs a global Ledger of Things, aka the industrial blockchain. Factory managers will use smart devices to monitor production lines, warehouse inventory, distribution, quality, and other inspections. Entire industries may adopt the ledger approach to significantly increase efficiency for such processes as supply chain management. Large and complex machines, like airplanes and locomotives, consist of millions of parts. Each individual component of a jet engine or railcar could have sensors that send out an alert when it needs fixing. Imagine a train on its way from Baltimore to Long Beach notifying the maintenance crew in Long Beach three days ahead of time that it needed a critical new part.

Government Digital Service, noted that the perfect register “should be able to prove the data hasn’t been tampered with” and should store a history of the changes that have been made, plus “be open to independent scrutiny.”21 Blockchain-based systems can infuse efficiency and integrity into document registries of all kinds and many other government processes. Let’s combine supply chain management with the Internet of Things to tag a new piece of equipment with a smart chip that communicates its provenance, ownership, warranties, or special information. Government procurement offices could track items and automate processes at every step: purchasing, releasing payment, paying sales taxes, renewing a lease, or ordering an upgrade.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

He developed techniques for mathematically modeling industrial systems, focusing on how feedback loops and time delays governed flows and stockpiles of resources and products. The culmination of that work, Industrial Dynamics, was published in 1961. It analyzed the workings of a General Electric plant in Kentucky, laying the foundations for modern supply-chain management.51 Having mastered the corporation, Forrester looked for other complex systems to which he could apply the cybernetic tool kit he now called generally “system dynamics.” When former Boston mayor John Collins was appointed as a visiting professor of urban affairs at MIT and, by sheer coincidence, moved into the office next door, Forrester seized the opportunity.

., 63 Smithsonian Magazine, 50 Snow, John, 189 social networks: cities as hubs for, 5, 159–64, 304 early days of, 123–25, 234 predictive recommendations for, 152 Songdo, South Korea, 23–31 International Business District in, 23 as largest private real-estate in history, 25 plans for TelePresence in, 49 as world’s largest experiment in urban automation, 24 Songdo U.Life, 49 Sony, 26 PlayStation Network of, 274 Portapak of, 115 Sopwith Camel, 21 Sorkin, Michael, on Archigram, 21 South by Southwest Interactive festival, 146 South Korea: broadband connectivity in, 26 tallest building in, 27 technological innovation in, 23–30 as world leader in smart-city technology, 26 SpaceShipOne, 203 Spain, 217–23 “15–M” movement in, 217 Sprint, 122 Square, 28 Standage, Tom, 44 Stanford University, 44 Starbucks, technological innovation at, 28 Steal This Book (Hoffman), 227 steam power, 5 Steenson, Molly, 21 Stockholm, 244 Stoller, Max, 150 Stoney, George, 116 Street, John, 194–95 Strickland, Eliza, 49 Strowger, Almon B., 36 structural design, innovations in, 19–30 Stuxnet, 266–69 suburbia, 101, 143 Sunlight Foundation, 238 supply-chain management, 77 surveillance, 270–76 private systems of, 275 Surveillance Camera Players, protest theater of, 13 Switzerland, 87 Symantec, 268 systems analysis: dynamics techniques in, 77, 81, 86 engineering in, 77 urban modelling in, 84–86, 88–90 Tabulating Machine Company, 61–62 Tallinn, 245 Taylor, Robert, 260 TCP (Transmission Protocol), 266 TCP/IP, 110 Teach for America, 238 TechCrunch, 151 technology: city-funded projects for, 243 disasters of, 256–58 innovation in, 107–10 overstandardization of, 249–51 repurposing of, 119–20 scaling of, 165, 201, 232, 243, 249, 313–14 as a tool of empowerment, 117–20 technology industry: limited urban understanding of, 224, 247–48 rhetoric of, 107, 278, 288, 317 “walled gardens” of, 123 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), 67 Tel Aviv, 233 telecom bubble, 44 Telecom Italia, 137, 161 telecommunications industry, 109–11 obstruction by, 197–98 telecommuting, 6 telegraph: city administration changed through, 5 as first urban digital communication network, 42 as fourth utility, 44 history of, 42–44, 254 industrial management changed through, 5 police use of, 5 in railroad operations, 5 Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske, 38 telemetry, 150 telephone: early history of, 5 evolution since 1970s of, 35–37 historical role in social networks, 160–61 TelePresence videoconferencing systems, 46, 49 Teoría General de la Urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization) (Cerdà), 43–44 terrorism, 270–71 Tesla, Nicola, 56 Thinking About the Unthinkable (Kahn), 277 Thomas, Martyn, 265 Tidepools, 293 Tivadar, Puskás, 254 Tokyo, Shibuya Crossing at, 34–35 Tolva, John, 64–65, 208–11, 294 To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (Howard), 94 “topsight,” 70, 72, 87 Torrone, Phillip, 137–39 Total Information Awareness (TIA), 270–72 Toughbook, 127 traffic engineers, 100–101 traffic jams: impact on cities, 99–103 prediction of, 7 Trendnet, 275 Triumph of the City (Glaeser), 160 Turner, Ted, 116 Twitter, 135, 151, 154–55, 240 in Arab Spring, 12 in Moldovan “Revolution,” 169, 171 in Spain’s anti-austerity protests, 161–62, 218 Uber, 232 ubicomp (ubiquitous computing), 113 “u-chip,” 23 “u-cities,” 26 Ullman, Ellen, 256 uncertainty principle, 88 Union Square Ventures, 154 United Nations: in declaration on Internet access, 288 demographic predictions of, 1–2 Foundation of, 278 Global Pulse project of, 181–84, 191 Millennium Development Goals of, 175 Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative at, 163 University College (London), 85 urban dynamics, 82–83, 89 Urban Dynamics (Forrester), 76–78, 82, 86 urban expressways, 101–2 “urban informatics,” systems to process signals as, 32 “urban information architecture,” management and business of, 32 urbanism, sustainable, 83 urbanization: digital technology intersection with, 4 problems of, 8, 162 Urban Land Institute, 30 urban planning, 77–92, 311–16 with computer modelling, 81, 295–98 cybernetics in, 84 “data enthusiasm” in, 315 grassroots organizing in, 8–9, 102–5, 235 impact of cars in, 98–106 innovative potential of, 9–11, 305–6 lattice vs.


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

Lafley developed advanced skills and sensitivities over a quarter-century at Procter & Gamble before he took over the top job. He began as a brand assistant, fresh from Harvard Business School after a five-year stint in the U.S. Navy. He had already developed a stance that said the world would welcome new ideas, and that he was capable of generating those ideas. He acquired a set of tools over his career—supply-chain management in the navy, general management theory from Harvard Business School, and brand-building techniques from the masters at P&G—which he employed to good effect. Finally, he gained experiences that developed both his skills and his sensitivities. He experienced running large and highly profitable product lines that needed to innovate and grow; he experienced introducing a relatively unknown brand against a dominant traditional player; and he experienced firsthand how the decisions made by marketing managers affect the sales and distribution teams.


The Rules of Work, Expanded Edition: A Definitive Code for Personal Success (The Rules by Richard Templar) by Richard Templar

double entry bookkeeping, hiring and firing, job satisfaction, supply-chain management

You should, of course, know what they all mean. 224 THE RULES OF WORK RULE 95 You should also know what all the latest management disciplines are and how they might affect you. Try not to sound out of date when you talk of management techniques. For instance, it was called logistics in my day, but now it is supply chain management—and by the time you are reading this it will be something else, I expect. You should know what the advantages and disadvantages of any of these buzzwords are just in case they crop up and you want to look good. There ought to be a sort of bluffer’s guide to management speak, but I don’t think there is.


pages: 168 words: 56,211

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Abraham Maslow, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spice trade, supply-chain management, Vilfredo Pareto

In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. It would be in everyone’s best interest that doctors not waste time learning how to fix boilers, that train drivers not sew clothes for their children and that Biscuit Packaging Technologists leave questions of warehousing to graduates in supply-chain management, the better to concentrate their own energies on the improvement of roll-wrap mechanisms. In a perfect society, so specialised would all jobs be, that no one would any longer understand what anyone else was doing. During a series of often bewildering conversations with members of staff, I came to realise that a Paretan utopia was now a realistic prospect at United Biscuits.


Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

This layer can consist of many applications depending on the requirements such as transportation, healthcare, financial, insurance, or supply chain management. This list, of course, is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination; there is a myriad of IoT applications that can fall into this layer. With the availability of cheap sensors, hardware, and bandwidth, IoT has gained popularity in recent years and currently has applications in many different areas including healthcare, insurance, supply chain management, home automation, industrial automation, and infrastructure management. Moreover, advancements in technology such as the availability of IPv6, smaller and powerful processors, and better internet access have also played a vital role in the popularity of IoT.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The past fifteen years have seen extensive investments in business infrastructure, which have improved the ability to collect data throughout the enterprise. Virtually every aspect of business is now open to data collection and often even instrumented for data collection: operations, manufacturing, supply-chain management, customer behavior, marketing campaign performance, workflow procedures, and so on. At the same time, information is now widely available on external events such as market trends, industry news, and competitors’ movements. This broad availability of data has led to increasing interest in methods for extracting useful information and knowledge from data—the realm of data science.

Data mining is used for general customer relationship management to analyze customer behavior in order to manage attrition and maximize expected customer value. The finance industry uses data mining for credit scoring and trading, and in operations via fraud detection and workforce management. Major retailers from Walmart to Amazon apply data mining throughout their businesses, from marketing to supply-chain management. Many firms have differentiated themselves strategically with data science, sometimes to the point of evolving into data mining companies. The primary goals of this book are to help you view business problems from a data perspective and understand principles of extracting useful knowledge from data.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

I push the boundaries of what I’m allowed to do,” he told us. Berdish was originally hired to work at Ford Aerospace but couldn’t get security clearance because of his grandfather’s labor history. So he went on to work at Ford, first in manufacturing, then as a financial analyst, a purchasing manager, a buyer, and a supply chain manager, before moving over to manage Ford’s sustainability practice in 2000. “It was during my manufacturing rotations that I started understanding people and the health and safety issues.” He brought his breadth of experience within the company to start building out Ford’s leadership on human rights—health and safety—around the world.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Manufacturers are more likely to be exporters than other types of businesses, and exporters tend to be more productive than non-exporting firms. But when politicians talk about manufacturing it tends to be in terms of the production line: assembling parts into cars, washing machines or aircraft, which adds less value than it once did. It is the processes that accompany assembly – design, supply-chain management, servicing – that today add the most value. Manufacturing, and jobs in manufacturing, have changed in ways that mean that the old jobs will never return to the rich world. Because of these changes, working out how many people are employed in manufacturing is tricky. Between the 1840s and the 1960s in Britain, manufacturing’s share of employment hovered at around a third; today, official data show around one worker in ten is involved in manufacturing.


How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

I learned how to rapidly set up and tear down a bar several times a day whether inside a two-hundred-year-old dining hall or in the middle of a football field. And I learned that no matter the time of day, there’s some class of Harvard alumni ready to drink, from Bloody Marys in the morning for older alumni to cup after cup of beer for the younger reunion attendees. The job was thrilling, chaotic, and entertaining, offering crash courses in supply-chain management and interpersonal communication. It also taught me that serving alcohol to alumni is the best way to understand the value of a Harvard education. I got the opportunity, time and again, to interact with people at every stage of post-college life. I saw their hormones on a rampage at the fifth-year reunion, their parenting skills under pressure at the fifteenth, their hairlines receding at an inverse rate to their income for the twenty-fifth, and their dwindling numbers beyond the fortieth.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

No penny-pinching technology can remove the human from the fundamental process of creation, no piece of software can speed the production of thought, even as the cost of producing books gallops ahead with the rest of the economy. For many centuries, publishers lived in denial of cost disease. In fact, they spent large parts of their day in denial of the fact that they worked for fully capitalist enterprises. Over time, they rationalized their firms—they attempted to master the sciences of marketing and supply-chain management. Yet there was a fundamental mystery at the heart of book publishing. It was impossible to know the worth of a book before its publication, no way to predict its value with any precision. Each book is its own entity, its own fickle market. What’s more, the denizens of publishing houses didn’t necessarily approach their jobs with a mercantilist mind-set.


pages: 276 words: 64,903

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Solutions count—they’re the currency of your realm. You don’t want team members to be your clones. You will need, if not always appreciate, analytical creativity and tenacity from other disciplinary backgrounds as your enterprise grows. In fact, team members skilled in areas outside your own personal interest zone—perhaps like HR, supply-chain management, or finance—may get far more freedom working in your organization. That can translate into a wonderful recruiting tool for you to bring exceptional talent onto your team in those domains. If you really need to master one of these areas in your company for your own comfort level, fine. But beware—your questioning can come across as second-guessing and eroding the esprit de corps and mutual accountability that are the hallmarks of highly functioning teams.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

These new fund managers take risks, with assurance that the companies they invest in provide accurate information, have liquid shares, trade cheaply and quickly and exist free of stock manipulation. These funds rarely own Russian gas refiners, as they fail all of the above assurances. But funds do own weird companies that make components for optical wave division multiplexing or some new biopharma company or the latest in supply chain management software, but they require automated trading systems to stay quick of foot. The New York Stock Exchange is still a people intensive exchange. Its specialist system was created in 1871. And we are still stuck with the NYSE monopoly on listed shares. Lots of reasons are offered, such as centralized pools of liquidity or orderly markets, etc.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Founded in 1996, Webvan was an online grocery business that did home delivery and operated in ten urban markets; it went bankrupt in 2001. Finally, Pets.com was founded in 1998 and sold pet supplies to customers; it closed in 2000. Logistics challenges were a common theme in the failure of all three: see John C. Wu, “Anatomy of a Dot-Com,” Supply Chain Management Review 5, no. 6 (November/December 2001): 42–50; William Aspray, George Royer, and Melissa G. Ocepek, Food in the Internet Age (New York: Springer Publishing, 2013), 25–35; Thornton and Marche, “Sorting through the Dot Bomb Rubble,” 121–38. 99, Yet an early observer … “This is horrible …”: Quoted in Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014 [2013]), 78. 99, Amazon’s margins were made … Amazon’s dot-com-crash blues: Ibid., 100–35.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Glass bet big on Supercenters, selling groceries alongside general merchandise inside cavernous new stores staffed by some 300 workers. Some questioned this thrust, given the low margins and brutal competition among supermarkets. But Glass didn’t waver. “I’ve always been a proponent of one-stop shopping,” he said. And before long, Walmart used its superior technology and supply-chain management capabilities to become an industry juggernaut. In 1988, Walmart had two Supercenters. When Glass stepped down as CEO in 2000, there were more than 700 (as well as 1,800 Walmart discount stores, now in all 50 states and Puerto Rico; nearly 500 Sam’s Clubs; and a presence in eight other countries).


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

For the entrepreneur—and we use the term loosely, to include anyone with a good idea and a passion to find an audience for it—pull means the difference between success and failure. As with emergence over authority, pull strategies exploit the reduced cost of innovation that new methods of communication, prototyping, fund-raising, and learning have made available. So-called “push-pull” strategies originated, aptly enough, in the fields of logistics and supply chain management, but in 2005 John Hagel, a management consultant, and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist at Xerox Corp., wrote a series of articles applying the concept to a much broader array of fields. It has a particularly dramatic potential in hardware, since pull could ostensibly transform the entire supply chain in that industry.


pages: 267 words: 74,296

Unhappy Union: How the Euro Crisis - and Europe - Can Be Fixed by John Peet, Anton La Guardia, The Economist

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, Doha Development Round, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Money creation, moral hazard, Northern Rock, oil shock, open economy, pension reform, price stability, quantitative easing, special drawing rights, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, éminence grise

OTHER ECONOMIST BOOKS Guide to Analysing Companies Guide to Business Modelling Guide to Business Planning Guide to Cash Management Guide to Commodities Guide to Decision Making Guide to Economic Indicators Guide to Emerging Markets Guide to the European Union Guide to Financial Management Guide to Financial Markets Guide to Hedge Funds Guide to Investment Strategy Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus Guide to Managing Growth Guide to Organisation Design Guide to Project Management Guide to Supply Chain Management Numbers Guide Style Guide Book of Business Quotations Book of Isms Book of Obituaries Brands and Branding Business Consulting Business Strategy Buying Professional Services Doing Business in China Economics Managing Talent Managing Uncertainty Marketing Marketing for Growth Megachange – the world in 2050 Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence Organisation Culture Successful Strategy Execution The World of Business Directors: an A–Z Guide Economics: an A–Z Guide Investment: an A–Z Guide Negotiation: an A–Z Guide Pocket World in Figures UNHAPPY UNION How the euro crisis – and Europe – can be fixed John Peet and Anton La Guardia THE ECONOMIST IN ASSOCIATION WITH PROFILE BOOKS LTD AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Ltd, 2014 Text copyright © John Peet and Anton La Guardia, 2014 First published in 2014 by Profile Books Ltd. in Great Britain.


pages: 261 words: 16,734

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister

A Pattern Language, An Inconvenient Truth, cognitive dissonance, DeepMind, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Parkinson's law, performance metric, skunkworks, supply-chain management, women in the workforce

Give them the chance to fly together, eat out together, and work out their roles in the new team. The Outward Bound schools make a thriving business of taking corporate groups into the wilderness and testing their mettle. Groups must make their way over Burma bridges and chutes, survive the waters of Penobscot Bay, or scale the face of Mount Katahdin. One day you’re struggling with Supply Chain Management, and the next, you’re hanging by your fingernails while a teammate belays you a line. Of course, the experience isn’t cheap. By the time you count the cost of the school, travel, and lost days, it comes to at least several thousand dollars per person. In most companies, such an expense would be unthinkable.


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

For example, a company doesn’t need to put its efforts into developing a new online payment system; it can use Stripe, Square, or PayPal instead. A company doesn’t need to invest time and resources in building a content management system for its website; it can use WordPress. Streaming video required? Just use YouTube. Looking for supply chain management? There are now hundreds of software solutions. By using existing technology to run as much of a business as possible, you can better focus on your core idea—the core solution—and find your core niche. Because the first launch generally doesn’t yield amazing results, companies of one should try to get it out of the way as soon as they have something to launch.


pages: 289 words: 77,532

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alan Greenspan, Bakken shale, bank run, Bear Stearns, business cycle, commodity super cycle, Credit Default Swap, diversification, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, index fund, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, oil-for-food scandal, paper trading, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, the market place

Once they decided how to bet in the markets, they, like Andurand at BlueGold, would then turn to underlings to actually buy the proper contracts and watch their performance day to day. Ben Bergum, a graduate of Montana State University’s accounting program who now handled many of the details, had just been hired. He worked with other employees in Delta’s supply-chain management area who tallied the amount of fuel the airline needed and what its price exposure might be as a result. The group sat in the flight-operations center of the Delta campus, isolated from Jacobson and other finance employees, and Bergum himself worked in a cubicle that was crushed against a thick column, next to a printer, envelopes, and other office supplies.


Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

The company was selling a few million in revenue and had a handful of noteworthy, highly-respected, and well-known clients. 4 Through our analysis—although print management and centralized “brand control” was valuable to its customers—we decided that the real core competency of the business was in its inventory management and fulfillment capabilities, which provides its customers the benefits of lean supply chain management practices. It was clear that the product lines could be easily expanded. Indeed, one of the biggest clients came to the seller and asked if he could put other products important to their supply chain into the online ordering system. We saw the potential to build a true business-to-business fulfillment company from the existing infrastructure, providing a private and customized “Amazon-like experience” for companies with multiple locations.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Among other JD.com innovations are unmanned convenience stores, augmented reality mirrors for online shoppers to try on lipsticks and other cosmetics virtually, and a service where a well-dressed courier wearing white gloves drops off purchases at appointed times to car trunks or other designated spots. Digging deeper into e-commerce, JD.com has embarked on a strategy to provide technology and logistics smarts as a retail service for its merchants and other retailers. This new initiative includes robotics-operated fulfillment centers, big-data analysis of merchandise sales, and supply-chain management. The company’s logistics operation, which I saw at work in a Beijing warehouse, is pioneering with full automation. The operation spans to drones to reach rural areas, autonomous delivery vehicles on Beijing university campuses, and self-driving trucks on select routes. Tencent has likewise begun digging into e-commerce too in China.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

One of the initiatives introduced by Howard Rankin, who drove our diversity and inclusion efforts, was a “reverse” mentor program that paired Best Buy executives with employees who would mentor them to help broaden their understanding of differences. I was incredibly lucky to have Laura Gladney, an African American mother of two working in supply chain management at Best Buy, as my mentor. Our monthly discussions helped me see the world in general, and Best Buy in particular, through her eyes, which helped me measure the weight of history and what it means to be African American in the United States today. I learned how, for example, the once vibrant Rondo community in St.


pages: 291 words: 77,986

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself: A Novel by Marisa Crane

dumpster diving, supply-chain management

I text him a link to the definition of conditional then chuck my phone at the wall. I can’t remember my father ever talking about himself. Sure, I know some typical facts like where he grew up (everywhere), his major (chemical engineering), his GPA (3.34), his last job before he retired (director of supply chain management for an artificial flavor company), but I can get all that from scanning his resume. Who is he? I wonder. What does he care about? What makes him cry? How does he process his pain, if at all? Who does he want to be? All I know is, as a kid, the only thing that helped me sleep was the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and it was my dad who stayed up until all hours vacuuming my room and the hallway outside.


pages: 439 words: 79,447

The Finance Book: Understand the Numbers Even if You're Not a Finance Professional by Stuart Warner, Si Hussain

AOL-Time Warner, book value, business intelligence, business process, cloud computing, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, forward guidance, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, market bubble, Northern Rock, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, supply-chain management, time value of money

Today there is a wide choice of off-the-shelf systems such as Sage and QuickBooks, most of which offer cloud-based versions. Figure 4: Accounts Large (and increasingly some medium-sized) organisations are more likely to use ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems such as SAP and Oracle. These provide an integrated suite of subsystems which besides finance include supply chain management, production processing, customer relationship management, human resources and other areas of the business. The growth in technology has seen ‘finance’ change from transaction processing and routine analysis towards more ad hoc analysis and business support roles. Many large organisations use shared service centres (a central department within a multidivisional organisation) which are used for processing transactions and the more routine aspects of accounting.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

The tyranny of choice: Why the consumer revolution is ruining your life. The New Republic, pp. 22–25. we need to ignore 39,850 items Trout, J. (2005, December 5). Differentiate or die. Forbes. one million products Knolmayer, G. F., Mertens, P., Zeier, A., & Dickersbach, J. T. (2009). Supply chain management case studies. Supply Chain Management Based on SAP Systems: Architecture and Planning Processes. Berlin: Springer, pp. 161–188. showed poorer impulse control Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision-making, self-regulation, and active initiative.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Most of us don’t think about risk this way; we typically associate the word with danger or loss, what people in finance call “downside risk,” and perhaps also with gains, or upside risk. But more broadly, risk can be thought of as variability, volatility, spread, unpredictability—any deviation (positive or negative) from steady, predictable outcomes. This is how supply-chain managers typically view risk. Most systems benefit from predictability, so in most situations, variation is a bad thing: having too little inventory to fill orders (a shortage) is as much of a problem as having too much inventory (an overstock). Similarly, given the same average most people prefer a narrower spread.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

The same economy that had been flattened by the housing crash saw gold prices skyrocket, and Nevada’s mines were hiring. More than a dozen former Empire employees left for jobs with the Barrick Gold Corporation, which owned several nearby sites. But others among the dispossessed workers were having a harder time. “I threw out a few resumes, haven’t gotten any bites,” former supply chain manager Dan Moran told me. “I might just end up cutting firewood for a living.” Monica Baker, twenty-two, who grew up in Empire, had recently moved back to town from Oahu with two young children on the promise of factory work, only to be broadsided by the shutdown. “I was really pissed off about it because they kept telling me I’d have a job here,” she said.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

They are designed to be “an automated person who knows how to do a task in much the same way that a colleague would.”2 This is why Blue Prism describes their RPA programs as “robots” instead of software. They are synthetic workers, in essence. This type of AI aims to cut jobs for people involved in the back-office processes commonly found in finance, accounting, supply chain management, customer service, and human resources. RPA robots are remarkably simple to implement. “They’re easy to use and have a relatively low cost,” says Frances Karamouzis, who is research vice president of the IT research firm Gartner.3 Adoption of RPA is booming. One consultant company, Transparency Market Research, expects RPA implementation to grow at 60 percent per year worldwide through 2020.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

Night after night, our account stared at us, all in cash. And I stared right back, paralyzed with indecision. At the time, Bryce was earning his master of engineering degree at the University of Toronto and taking an economics course. While most of the material was dry and not useful unless you’re in supply chain management, one article jumped out at him. It was about the Nobel Prize–winning concept created by economist Harry Markowitz in the 1950s: Modern Portfolio Theory. WHAT IS MODERN PORTFOLIO THEORY? Modern Portfolio Theory says that assets boil down to two measurements: expected return and volatility.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

They can also start the other way around, with a transaction – someone paying for the software that allows them to start playing World of Warcraft – and develop to enable a mass of gifting – players sharing content with one another in self-organising guilds. The industrialised economies spent most of the 20th century honing the management disciplines of mass production, from industrial relations to branding and supply-chain management. At the start of the century there was no science of management. By its end we had business schools, expensive executive training programmes, libraries of books, and pricey management consultancies. The web’s creative potential will be realised in the century to come only if we become equally sophisticated about managing and leading creative collaborations.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

In the future, if deliveries depend more on automated systems, trucking may not remain as vulnerable—but the principle remains that if certain hub industries are paralyzed by loss of people, the impact can be far-reaching. There will be other choke points that depend on people: doctors and nurses, engineers who run power grids or essential manufacturing, or global supply chain managers are not all readily replaced. Even transient absences of key workers can cause snowballing problems. During Covid-19 lockdowns, oil refineries are shutting due to plummeting demand as air and road traffic fall. In a pandemic with a high loss of people, absence of workers at oil refineries starts becoming a problem.


pages: 422 words: 86,414

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices by Harihara Subramanian

blockchain, business logic, business process, cloud computing, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, cyber-physical system, data science, database schema, DevOps, disruptive innovation, domain-specific language, fault tolerance, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Salesforce, self-driving car, semantic web, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, software as a service, SQL injection, supply-chain management, web application, WebSocket

With the emergence of cloud environments as the one-stop IT solution for all kinds of business offerings and operations, it's projected that in the years ahead, most enterprise, personal, mobile, and web applications will reside in clouds (public, private, hybrid, and edge). The popular enterprise-grade applications are enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), knowledge and content management, HR, finance and facility management, and asset management. Besides, all kinds of operational, transactional, and analytical applications are also being modernized and migrated to cloud environments in order to reap the benefits (user, technical, and business) of the cloud.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

From the revolutionary red of its paper mailers to the company’s triumphant announcement of service “whenever, wherever and on whatever device,” Netflix has competed and won based on the aesthetics of abstraction. It should come as little surprise, then, that when the company began to evolve from an Amazon-like titan of logistics and supply-chain management (moving DVDs around the country better than anyone else) to content creator, it would continue to depend on algorithmic analysis. But what happens when algorithms are used to shape the creative process, to create public works of culture that are far more legible to humans than to machines?


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

Emerging-market companies have proven to be formidable competitors on cost. As we will allude to in Chapter 9, emerging-market players, particularly in capital-intensive industries, are increasingly capital light and inventive. That elevates the need for developed-market companies to innovate and localize research and product design, rethink supply-chain management and financing, and, in some cases, partner up to gain easier access to existing infrastructure. •In India, General Electric has devised an electrocardiograph machine that can be sold profitably for $1,500, less than one-fifth the price of traditional electrocardiograph monitors in advanced markets.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

There are already technologies in use that help detect driver fatigue. For example, Caterpillar uses infrared cameras to monitor the driver’s eyes, and a computer monitors blink rate and pupil size. Should it detect the drivers are sleepy, it will alert them using audio alarms and seat vibrations. Another possible use-case is in supply chain management where the predictive analysis techniques of Big Data can come into play. The world’s largest logistic companies need to know the latest current events on a global scale, such as the political climate as well as the local weather conditions that affect traditional trade routes. They need to know of impending strike action by traffic controllers or crane drivers in a shipping port, as these could cause massive disruption and have a knock-on effect to a customer’s stock inventory levels.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

But Hagenbeck did almost none of the actual animal capture himself; instead, he ran a vertically integrated system that stretched from trappers in sub-Saharan Africa to the showrooms and expositions that Hagenbeck began establishing across Europe and the United States. Wild-animal trader has an undeniably buff ring to it as a job description, but in the end Hagenbeck’s success was largely due to his skills at supply chain management. Notoriously, the showman did not limit himself to the animals of the world; he also staged a number of hugely successful—and, to modern eyes, hugely offensive—exhibitions of “savages in their natural state”: Inuits from Labrador, Nubians from the Egyptian Sudan. Yet, for all his travels, Hagenbeck’s most important legacy didn’t take shape until he settled down.


Istanbul Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, low cost airline, supply-chain management, the built environment, urban sprawl, yield management

Until recently, the art of bargaining was one of these. Times have changed, though, and these days the non-negotiable price tag reigns supreme in most of the city’s retail outlets. Here, as in many former stops along the legendary Silk Road, the days of camel caravans have long gone, supplanted by multinational retailers, sleek supply-chain management and an increasingly homogeneous shopping experience. Perhaps the only exception to this rule can be found in the city’s carpet shops, particularly those located in the Grand Bazaar. Many of these still take pride in practising the ancient art of bargaining. If you are visiting İstanbul and are keen to buy a carpet or rug in the bazaar, keep the following tips in mind: AThe ‘official’ prices here have almost always been artificially inflated to allow for a bargaining margin ­– 20% to 30% is the rule of thumb.


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

.* Human self-deception makes our job difficult for another reason: no one wants to believe in its existence, and it is something which people seem only to accept at a shallow, theoretical level.* People are much more comfortable attributing the success of a business to superior technology or better supply-chain management than to an unconscious, unspoken human desire. Perhaps that’s because we patently need a level of self-delusion to function as a social species.* Imagine a world where we had no capacity for deception, and where people on dates directly asked prospective partners about their earning power and career prospects, without even pretending to be interested in their personalities.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

“Computer and Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox in a Not-Too-Distant Mirror,” Center for Economic Policy Research, no. 172, Stanford University, July 1989, http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4115.pdf. 10. For instance, Materials Resource Planning (MRP) systems, which begat Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and then Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and, more recently, Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics and many other large-scale systems. 11. Todd Traub, “Wal-Mart Used Technology to Become Supply Chain Leader,” Arkansas Business, http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/85508/wal-mart-used-technology-to-become-supply-chain-leader (accessed July 20, 2013). 12.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another. Burt found that bridging capital puts people at greater risk of having good ideas (his phrase) than do any individual traits. For something like supply chain management, it’s easy to see why this might be so—the department handling that function was separated from the rest of the electronics business and was not seen as a core function. The converse was also true; if the proposer of an idea was talking only within his or her own department, the idea was much likelier to be parochial.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The charge: over the previous year, Amazon had hired about 15 of Walmart’s employees, including Amazon’s CIO in 1998, Richard Dalzell, who joined the company in 1997 after serving as a Walmart vice president. Walmart claimed that these former employees had leaked proprietary information about Walmart’s famed supply chain management systems. The suit was settled in 1999, but it underscored the fact that Amazon wasn’t merely investing in product variety or search and discovery innovations like user reviews and recommendations. They were making massive investments into inventing an entirely new infrastructure for inventory management, warehousing, and delivery, one that was optimized for a retail world in which goods had to be moved not in bulk to outlets or stores, but one-by-one to individual consumers.


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

We combine the appropriate multidisciplinary scientific and technical teams, including biologists, modelers, data analysts, and engineers, to industrialize processes and execute on delivering the product on time and within budget. Each module is linked into a large-scale data generation pipeline where standard operating procedures (SOPs), supply chain management, and careful quality control measures are all employed in a high-throughput setting. Once generated, data enters our Informatics Data Pipeline where it goes through multiple rounds of processing and quality control on its way to becoming part of one of our freely available online products.


pages: 398 words: 86,855

Bad Data Handbook by Q. Ethan McCallum

Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Benoit Mandelbrot, business intelligence, cellular automata, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, conceptual framework, data science, database schema, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, Gini coefficient, hype cycle, illegal immigration, iterative process, labor-force participation, loose coupling, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, selection bias, sentiment analysis, SQL injection, statistical model, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, text mining, too big to fail, web application

To modify the data is to clean it up, enrich it, or otherwise tweak it for some particular purpose. You can use the data to guide internal decisions, and also distribute it externally to clients or collaborators. The pattern is repeated as data passes from source to recipient, who in turn becomes the source for the next recipient, and so on. This is quite similar to supply chain management for tangible goods: one can trace the flow of raw material through perhaps several intermediate firms. Some goods, such as food and drink, have a final destination in that they are consumed. Others, through recycling and repurposing, may continue through the chain for perpetuity. One critical element of the supply chain concept is accountability: one should be able to trace a good’s origins and any intermediate states along the way.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

At the Green Swan Day event, Tim Smit celebrated the combination of the internet, which enables everyone in the world to have a voice, and the rise of the “smartest generation that has yet lived.”56 The five principles of exponential leadership outlined next are all based on things we have been experimenting with. There have been ups and downs, of course. Several things I have been involved in have failed, including the Social Stock Exchange. On the other hand, several have gone ballistic, including the extraordinarily successful EcoVadis, a supply chain management company that has gone from perhaps a dozen employees in Paris when I first got involved to more than six hundred today, operating from a dozen offices worldwide. The five principles outlined in the next chapter are no guarantee of success, but they do seem to be working for us. I hope that at least some of them will work for you.


pages: 290 words: 90,057

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

How Locus robots came to be built is part of a broader tale of the revolution and fierce competition sweeping the logistics world. Once a staid business personified by barrel-chested warehouse workers laboriously loading and unloading crates, it has become an industry increasingly driven by computer science PhDs writing algorithms and developing cutting-edge technology for every step in the delivery process. Supply chain management has become one of the fastest-growing majors at universities across the United States, with tens of thousands of students enrolling every year. In 2019, roughly eighteen billion e-commerce packages were shipped in the United States alone, generating more than $180 billion in logistics revenue—many multiples greater than a decade earlier, figures that are expected to keep growing.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

There was no turning back the clock on what Amazon had unleashed, but there were enough conscious consumers of books (and food, and clothing, and wetsuits) that opportunities abounded for alternatives to the monoculture of a future where you could only buy from one store. “Amazon feels like an algorithm,” Hunter said. “This feels like a place.” If it worked for books, could it work in other areas? In Miami, a Haitian American aerospace engineer named Nirva Boursiquot thought so. After years working in supply chain management with the Department of Defense, Boeing, and Airbus, Boursiquot grew tired of the judgment she faced as a young, Black woman in an overwhelmingly white, male industry. As she shopped for everyday goods and looked to support Black entrepreneurs with her dollars (especially after the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020), she saw an opportunity to help these Black businesses with her expertise in logistics.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

Samsung SDI, one of the world’s largest battery makers, said ‘it is impossible for us to determine whether the cobalt supplied to Samsung SDI comes from DRC Katanga’s mines’. Apple said only that it is ‘currently evaluating dozens of different materials, including cobalt, in order to identify labour and environmental risks’. VW said that its ‘internal system for sustainable supply chain management’ had not identified human rights abuses in cobalt supply chains. ‘It is a major paradox of the digital era that some of the world’s richest, most innovative companies are able to market incredibly sophisticated devices without being required to show where they source raw materials for their components,’ said Emmanuel Umpula, executive director of African Resources Watch, a local non-governmental organisation, who wrote the report with Amnesty.17 Amnesty’s report landed on the desk of Huayou’s headquarters in Tongxiang with an unpleasant thud.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

., “Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers,” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 2015): 1603, www.cs.cmu.edu/~mklee/materials/Publication/2015-CHI_algorithmic_management.pdf. every assembly line: For a broad overview of modern supply chain management, see generally Martin Christopher, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, 5th ed. (Harlow: Pearson, 2016), 35 (discussing how “just-in-time” strategy results in minimal inventory), 194 (the use of event management software to manage inventory levels), 225–26 (discussing the merits of Six Sigma management techniques), 289 (a change-embracing corporate culture).


The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

In addition, all significant scientific and technical efforts require reliable electric power and efficient logistical networks. In the manufacturing and retail sectors, efficient transportation and logistical networks allow firms to adopt process and organizational innovations, such as the just-in-time approach to supply chain management. Infrastructure promotes agricultural trade and helps integrate economies into world markets. It is also fundamental to human development, including the delivery of health and education services. Infrastructure investments further represent untapped potential for the creation of productive employment.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

According to Schoemaker (1991, p. 552), “A deeper scenario analysis would have recognized the confluence of special circumstances (e.g. high oil prices, tax incentives for drilling, conducive interest rates, etc.) underlying this temporary peak. Good scenario planning goes beyond just high-low projections.” 24. See Raynor (2007, p. 37). CHAPTER 8: THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS 1. Some more details about Zara’s supply chain management are provided in a Harvard Business Review case study of the company (2004, pp. 69–70). Additional details are provided in Kumar and Linguri (2006). 2. Mintzberg, it should be noted, was careful to differentiate strategic planning from “operational” planning, which is concerned with short-term optimization of existing procedures.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

I believe grocery retailers will have no choice but to copy Kroger or risk being left behind. CommonSense Robotics – which specializes in building automated grocery distribution facilities that operate in a fashion similar to Ocado’s CFCs – is more than likely the primary beneficiary of Kroger’s agreement with Ocado. Brittain Ladd is an expert in strategy and supply chain management. Ladd is also a former Amazon executive who holds the distinction of being one of the first individuals to recognize the need for Amazon to expand their business model to include a physical retail presence. In a 2013 research paper titled ‘A Beautiful way to Save Woolworths’, Ladd made the argument that Amazon should acquire either the retailer Whole Foods or the Texas-based regional grocery retailer HEB.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable. With this knowledge, however, we can carefully and consciously employ digital-era sync to the processes in our lives and businesses for which digiphrenia is not a liability. Real-time supply-chain management, for example, such as the system employed by retail clothing chain Zara, syncs the store checkout with the production line. At the same moment the scanner at the cash register identifies the yellow T-shirt, the information is sent to the production facility, the facility’s suppliers, and so on, all the way down the line.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Patrick Sawer, “East Wind Train Blows In from China to Re-open Silk Road Trail,” Telegraph, January 18, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/18/east-wind-train-blows-china-re-open-silk-road-trail/; Tracy McVeigh, “Silk Road Route Back in Business as China Train Rolls into London,” Guardian, January 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/14/china-silk-road-trade-train-rolls-london. 30. Hans-Joachim Schramm and Sabrina Zhang, “Eurasian Rail Freight in the One Belt One Road Era” (paper presented at the thirtieth annual NOFOMA Conference: Relevant Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Kolding, Denmark, July 13–15, 2018), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328880505_Eurasian_Rail_Freight_in_the_One_Belt_One_Road_Era. 31. This is not a new problem, nor is it one that is limited to rail or even trade between China and Europe. At any time, some 45 percent of dry-bulk cargo ships, which typically carry commodities, are traveling without cargo.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former economic advisor to President Obama, studies the effect of corporate power on wealth inequality, price hikes, and quashing of innovation. He currently gives Amazon a pass, believing the company shouldn’t be broken up. “Walmart figured out how to have better supply chain management and grew, and then Amazon did the same online so there’s more concentration in that sector and that reflects that increase in efficiency. That has a benign impact on the economy.” To understand what worries politicians and regulators both in America and in Europe, take the case of Brooks Brothers.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

It would most likely have to use a method called ‘agent-based modelling’ – that is, using computers to create millions of virtual workers, households and firms, and letting them interact spontaneously, within realistic boundaries. Even today such a model would be able to draw on realtime data. Weather sensors, city transport monitors, energy grids, postcode demographic data and the supply chain management tools of global supermarket groups are all giving off relevant macro-economic data in realtime. But the prize – once every object on earth is addressable, smart and feeding back information – is an economic model that does not just simulate reality but actually represents it. The agents modelled virtually are eventually substituted by granular data from reality, just as happens with weather computers.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Apps4Africa matches innovative African tech start-ups with the cash to get their businesses going and takes advantage of what is now more than 650 million mobile phone subscriptions on the African continent, more than in Europe or America. In addition to having the technology expertise, Grainy Bunch and iCow both reinforce the theory that wherever there is domain expertise and a willingness to apply big data technologies, there is an opportunity to create the businesses of the future. There are huge supply-chain management software companies in California and Germany, but Grainy Bunch was developed in a place with deep understanding about the supply chain for grain and grain markets. iCow was developed specifically for low-literacy dairy farmers who own just a few cows, the complete opposite of New Zealand, where Pasture Meter was developed and dairy herds frequently number in the thousands.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Evolution is effective because, rather than engaging in an exhaustive, time-consuming search for the highest peak – a peak that may not even be there tomorrow – it produces ongoing, ‘works for now’ solutions to a complex and ever-changing set of problems. In biological evolution, solutions include photosynthesis, pairs of eyes and mothers’ milk. In economic evolution, solutions include double-entry book-keeping, supply-chain management and ‘buy one, get one free’. Some of what works seems to be perennial. The rest, such as being a Tyrannosaurus rex or the world’s most efficient manufacturer of VHS video cassettes, is rooted in a particular place and time. We know that the evolutionary process is driven by variation and selection.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

And rather than hawked on stock exchanges like fish in the marketplace, the buying and selling of bonds was done by brokers through their personal networks, like pieces of antique furniture that needed to be found the right home. Nevertheless, for most borrowers, banks remained the dominant source of debt capital right up until the late 1970s. It was only then that the revolutions in information technology and supply-chain management began to unlock the logic of specialisation and the division of labour in finance as in so many other industries. The debt capital markets, it was realised, represented a vast opportunity to create intermediaries that specialised in individual component activities of banks; and hence the potential for enormous gains in efficiency.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

If risk could be controlled, then it could be increased and leveraged. For bankers, an efficient market theory was a persuasive argument in favor of wildly leveraging their capital to generate profits. Risk, after all, was under control. For corporate managers, EMT provided a rationale for controlling complex organizations at a time when “just-in-time” supply chain management was making it possible to expand globally. And so business schools began to focus on developing mathematical tools that aided in efficient management. The belief in the efficient market was so powerful that in 1976, economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling connected it directly to CEO compensation.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

This would predict a decrease of only 1 percent in retail prices, which is small compared to the relative price decline that we observe in Figure 2.3. What accounts for the bulk of the decline in retail prices in this period? The retail industry had clearly become more efficient, and the cost savings were passed on to consumers. Walmart’s advanced supply chain management system was a key contributor to this evolution. Through its vendor-managed inventory system, manufacturers are responsible for managing their own inventory in Walmart warehouses. Vendors can directly monitor the inventory of their goods in Walmart stores and send additional items when the stocks are low in a particular store.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It’s telling that the fastest way to become one of those top 10 percent of companies holding 80 percent of corporate wealth is to figure out how to leverage not physical assets or even capital, but the value of “intangible” assets, including data, patents, intellectual property, and networks. Companies in every industry are counting on such electronic data to spur growth over the next several years. Data-driven artificial intelligence could generate up to almost $6 trillion in revenues for companies that deploy it successfully. (The biggest gains now come in sales and supply-chain management.)40 Most of the CEOs I’ve spoken to are extremely bullish on the subject, claiming their AI investments yield between 10 and 30 percent returns. But the more data the AI has to work with, the better it goes. That’s good for corporations, but will cause a tremendous amount of disruption for citizens whose privacy is being compromised and workers whose jobs are being automated


pages: 461 words: 106,027

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business by Arvid Kahl

business logic, business process, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, content marketing, continuous integration, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, domain-specific language, financial independence, functional programming, Google Chrome, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, information retrieval, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kanban, Kubernetes, machine readable, minimum viable product, Network effects, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, software as a service, solopreneur, source of truth, statistical model, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, the long tail, trickle-down economics, value engineering, web application

An example of this would be a widget that displays industry-specific time-series graphs drawn from your data. Service extensions will allow your users to integrate plugins that enable them to use specific, non-generalizable functionality to manipulate the data that your product uses. An example of this would be a plugin that would pull in weather data from a public API into your supply chain management service. If you understand your product to be a source and a target for integrations from the start, opportunities for extensibility will appear all over the place. Take the ones with the highest impact on most users and implement them first. In some cases, you can enter partnerships with the companies that sell the service with which you integrate.


pages: 412 words: 113,782

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

So clearly, when the option exists to move things by rail or ship, we can reduce our energy footprint substantially by choosing wisely. Checking off the box to guarantee next day delivery by air increases the energy (and carbon) by 800 percent! When the option exists to use UPS Ground instead of UPS Air for parcel freight, we can save energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and dollars. As our vice president for supply chain management, Tim Riordan, has said, “When you take out the carbon, you take out the costs.” (Incidentally, as we’ll see later, our chief product designer, David Oakey, says exactly the same thing about product development.) That is exactly what our European factories discovered. Though our plant in the Netherlands once sent about 650 metric tons of carpet tiles to Italy each year in thirty trucks, using rail has shrunk their energy and CO2 footprint by 40 percent, and it reduced their shipping costs by 25 percent!


pages: 541 words: 109,698

Mining the Social Web: Finding Needles in the Social Haystack by Matthew A. Russell

Andy Rubin, business logic, Climategate, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, folksonomy, full text search, Georg Cantor, Google Earth, information retrieval, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, NP-complete, power law, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, sparse data, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, text mining, traveling salesman, Turing test, web application

Or maybe you want to map out professionals in your network according to their job duties, or the socioeconomic bracket they’re likely to fit in based on their job titles and experience. Beyond the numerous options opened up by visualizing your professional network’s location data, geographic clustering lends itself to many other possibilities, such as supply chain management and Travelling Salesman types of problems. Mapping Your Professional Network with Dorling Cartograms Protovis, a cutting-edge HTML5-based visualization toolkit introduced in Chapter 7, includes a visualization called a Dorling Cartogram, which is essentially a geographically clustered bubble chart.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

His embryonic start-up may have been a continent away from Silicon Valley, but it was well placed to take advantage of the talent pouring out of the many universities in the area, not least Mick’s alma mater, MIT. The fundamental challenge Mick and Kiva Systems faced was the same one that held back all of e-commerce: the world’s supply chains were not designed to handle individual items. Rather, they were built for containers, truckloads, pallets, and maybe, if your supply chain manager was particularly savvy, cases of goods. Various pallet- and case-level systems for handling these goods in warehouses were in use even in the late 1990s. Some of them were fairly sophisticated even then, most famously the ones pioneered by Walmart. Before Kiva, for nearly all retailers, automation in the supply chain ended at the distribution center.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

Bower countered that specialization would eventually entail flying people into and out of various local markets, undermining the firm’s practice of insinuating its consultants into the local business community.38 This issue with its push and pull was a constant for McKinsey, and one it wouldn’t ultimately resolve until the tail end of the century, when it stumbled on a characteristic solution. The firm capitulated to client demands for more specialized consultants while still maintaining a generalist veneer. In time, McKinsey offered its clients specialists in a range of industries and functions (e.g., supply-chain management, corporate finance) but at the same time managed to hold on to a vaunted image as boardroom consultants. The result: As with many things McKinsey, surface appearance didn’t tell the whole story. But the transition didn’t just take years; it took decades. In 1970 Lee Walton established a Practice Development Committee to look into carving out specific practice niches.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Which do you find more persuasive: foxes or hedgehogs? 6. Does your organization tend to carry out a small number of long-term, high-stakes projects, or a large number of shorter-term, more iterative projects? * Enterprise systems soon became known by their TLAs (three-letter acronyms)—ERP (enterprise resource planning), SCM (supply chain management), CRM (customer relationship management), HRM (human resource management), and so on. † Or, to be more accurate, a few pieces of software. Not even the most confident vendors of enterprise software proposed that one single system would suffice for everything a company needed to do. ‡ In recognition of his work literally inventing the web, Berners-Lee was dubbed Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 2004.


pages: 394 words: 124,743

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

As one of the few GM departments that could peer into every silo, from manufacturing to marketing to purchasing, it challenged small-bore capital allocations at the plant level and dictated how purchasing should handle a small, troubled parts supplier. When a supplier went into bankruptcy, which happened with great frequency in 2007 and 2008 as auto sales slowed, the treasury would hold up minor contract modifications that the supplier was trying to finalize—a process more in line with the duties of a midlevel supply-chain manager. As a result, Rick, Fritz, and other officers faced a mountain of daily decisions. Trivial issues loomed large while big ones got lost. Presentations on major issues to board meetings and executive meetings were often reduced to one or two PowerPoint slides and then put off or passed over lightly.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The city has a deep culture as an entrepôt of trade and entrepreneurship, supported by its deepwater port, its British legal and financial frameworks and its bilingual status. Having made the journey from trading port to labour‐intensive industry, high‐value‐ added production and finally to internationally traded services and supply chain management, Hong Kong retains a large pool of agile companies in trade, wholesale, retail and personal services that serve Asian and global markets. It is also Asia’s leading city for higher education institutions and among the ten most visited cities in the world. Over the last 30 years, Hong Kong has established itself as the business and capital‐raising gateway into and out of what is now the world’s second largest economy, China (Table 11.1).


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Trade Wilting There are several reasons why trade openness has diminished. For example, a shift in economic structure in China means fewer capital-expenditure-driven goods are traded. In addition, habitually weak demand from the eurozone has removed an important support for world trade. The rise of new technologies in manufacturing and supply-chain management has meant that many goods require less capital investment, and the trade dispute between the United States and China is fracturing international supply chains. Here technology has enabled some Western companies to relocate operations back to their own countries. Other indicators of globalization paint a more negative picture: cross-border flows of financial assets (relative to GDP) have continued downward from their pre-financial-crisis peak, probably because of the effects of regulation and the general shrinking of the banking sector.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

If we think of our laptops, for instance, we are not surprised when we are told that their various components—screens, keyboards, motherboards, batteries—are manufactured by different companies, invariably in different countries. And, within these factories, we would imagine a strict division of labour, with tasks allocated to appropriate individuals with appropriate levels of experience. We know that the disciplines of supply-chain management and logistics support the bringing together of diverse activities into a seamless single offering for the purchaser. Likewise, we see a move towards what we call decomposing and multisourcing across the professions. Professional work is no longer regarded as a monolithic, indivisible lump of activity, but instead is being decomposed (some say ‘disaggregated’)—that is, broken down into constituent tasks and allocated to other people and systems who are best placed to discharge the work at as low a cost as possible, consistent with the quality and the nature of the service required.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

The Skinny on Supply Chains To understand the path our products have taken to reach us, we need to understand their supply chains, which involve far more than merely getting something from point A (where it is made) to point B (where we buy it) but encompasses all the suppliers, component producers, workers, middlemen, financiers, warehouses, loading docks, ships, trains, trucks—basically every stop along the way from natural resource to retail outlet. In today’s globalized economy, a product’s supply chain can cover multiple continents and scores of businesses, each of which is trying to maximize its profit at that link in the chain. To that end, a whole complex science of supply chain management has evolved that fine-tunes every detail, to make and move things as quickly and cheaply as possible. Probably no one has more knowledge about supply chains than Professor Dara O’Rourke. During the years I was visiting polluting factories and dumps around the world, O’Rourke was investigating garment and shoe factories—sweatshops—in Honduras, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

These countries are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers, and $30 Mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just two cents a minute. They are reinventing systems of production, distribution, and exchange. And they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged or reinvented in one emerging market or another. Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap labor now becoming leaders in innovation? Most obviously because local companies are dreaming bigger dreams. Driven by a mixture of ambition and fear—ambition to bestride the world stage and fear of even cheaper competitors in, say, Vietnam or Cambodia—they are doggedly climbing the value chain.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Rather than just waiting for the hungry poor to turn up at its doorstep, it has become a food distribution giant, providing free school meals to 200,000 schoolchildren a day in Bangalore and, via sister temples, another 600,000 across the country. This miracle of abundance has been achieved by combining modern technology with modern supply-chain management and marketing pizzazz. The trucks that distribute the food display advertisements from global firms such as Philips, partly to raise revenue and partly to reap the benefits of what Chanchalapathi calls cobranding. His temple’s “strong and credible delivery model” is tested by his advisory board (which holds quarterly board meetings) and a “very tough” audit by KPMG, a giant accountancy firm.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

A few weeks later, Byrne announced he would not only be paying bitcoin-accepting vendors one week early, but that he’d also pay his employee bonuses in bitcoin. What companies such as Overstock are trying to do with digital-currency payments has parallels with what Walmart achieved by pioneering communications technology to revolutionize supply-chain management in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Arkansas-based retailer famously developed a sophisticated network with which to tie all of its suppliers worldwide into a single, integrated database for managing the goods and services flowing in and out of Walmart’s warehouses. Along with big improvements in shipping logistics, this allowed the company to optimize its just-in-time inventory management, which drastically cut its costs.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

How Much Does the iPhone Cost to Make? A Comprehensive Breakdown of Apple’s Product Supply Chain,” Macworld, November 24, 2016, http://​www​.macworld​.co​.uk/​feature/​apple/​where​-are​-apple​-products​-made​-how​-much​ -does​-iphone​-cost​-make​-india​-3633832/. 32. On COSCO’s trans-Eurasian supply-chain management, see Frans-Paul van der Putten, Mikko Huotari, John Seaman, Alice Ekman, and Miguel Otero-Iglesias, “The 302 Notes to Chapter 10 Role of OBOR in Europe-China Relations,” in Europe and China’s New Silk Roads: A Report by the European Think-Tank Network on China (ETNC), ed. Frans-Paul van der Putten et al.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

A Cross-Country Investigation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (November 1997):1251, 1252, 1260 (regression analysis of a twenty-ninemarket economy sample suggests that trust and civic cooperation are associated with stronger economic performance); Stephan M. Wagner, Linda Silver Coley, and Eckhard Lindemann, “Effects of Suppliers’ Reputation on the Future of Buyer-Supplier Relationships: The Mediating Roles of Outcome Fairness and Trust,” Journal of Supply Chain Management 47 (April 2011): 42 (noting that empirical findings support other research that “trust is the most impor tant mediator in business-to-business relationships”). 46. See Maurice E. Stucke, “Is Intent Relevant?” Journal of Law, Economics & Policy 8 (2012): 801 (collecting studies). 47. Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 48.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

Double-digit wage hikes in China: Chinese wages rose 10 percent a year between 2000 and 2005 and 19 percent a year between 2005 and 2010, according to Harold L. Sirkin et al., “U.S. Manufacturing Nears the Tipping Point,” BCG Perspectives, March 22, 2012; https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/manufacturing_supply_chain_management_us_manufacturing_nears_the_tipping_point/. Reshoring movement: According to “Coming Home,” Economist, January 19, 2013, most of the multinationals bringing production back to the United States cited as their reasons the rising wages in Asia and the discovery of the hidden costs of moving production far away from corporate offices.


Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions by Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

23andMe, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, Black Swan, business intelligence, card file, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, data science, database schema, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Firefox, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, information retrieval, lake wobegon effect, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, natural language processing, openstreetmap, Paradox of Choice, power law, prediction markets, profit motive, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Simon Singh, social bookmarking, social graph, SPARQL, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, supply-chain management, systematic bias, TED Talk, text mining, the long tail, Vernor Vinge, web application

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(4), 549–557. 204 CHAPTER TWELVE Download at Boykma.Com Chapter 13 CHAPTER THIRTEEN What Data Doesn’t Do Coco Krumme DATA DOES A GREAT MANY THINGS: IT ALLOWS US TO SEPARATE SCIENCE FROM SUPERSTITION AND THE repeatable from the random. Over the past several decades, scientists have scaled tremendously the processes for collecting, collating, and storing data. From medical decisionmaking to soft drink marketing to supply chain management, we’re relying more on fact and less on hunch. We’re letting data drive. But data doesn’t drive everything. Over the past century, psychologists have poked holes in the theory that people interpret data with anything close to rational equanimity. In truth, we’re biased in our interpretation of information.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

By the end of the 1990s, computers could be seen everywhere, not only on the desks of white-collar workers but also, in the form of miniaturized devices, in the hands of factory-floor workers. Companies eliminated a swath of clerical workers. Henceforward, managers could do their own typing and prepare their own spreadsheets and keep their own diaries. They also encouraged frontline workers to engage in their own reordering and supply-chain management. The other great change in this era was in the relationship between companies and the wider society. The great bureaucratic companies of the Keynesian age had accepted a litany of social responsibilities, from providing their workers with lifetime employment to funding the local opera.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

And here is where we could see the emergence of new types of companies—“Auto-Tech.” These would either be vertically integrated or strategically allied companies, from vehicle manufacture, to fleet management, to ride hailing through their own platforms. They would be the master coordinators of multiple capabilities—manufacturing, data and supply chain management, machine learning, software and systems integration, and the delivery of high-quality “mobility as a service” to customers around the world. At this point, there is still no tipping point where the benefits of new technology and business models prove so overwhelming that they obliterate the oil-fueled personal car model that has reigned for so long.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

But it would take more than codifying Jobs’s thinking to ensure that Apple succeeded. The CEO wasn’t preoccupied with Harvard Business School concepts of organizational behavior. The company he had built operated like a starfish. He sat at the intersection of legs that focused on excellence in marketing, design, engineering, and supply-chain management. He would crawl out to the end of a leg when he wished to and get personally involved, directing each division as he saw fit. Before his death, Jobs pressed to keep the legs of Apple’s starfish together. He approached members of the executive team individually and pushed them to commit to remaining several more years at the company.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

Carter also appointed two new commissioners: Marcus Alexis, also an economist, and Thomas Trantum, an investment banker who provided reliable support for Gaskins on regulatory issues. 75. Packwood resigned from the Senate in 1995 after it emerged that he had failed to adhere to the “consenting adults” standard in his personal relations. 76. Derthick and Quirk, Politics of Deregulation, 29. 77. “2018 State of Logistics Report,” Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. 78. The average “all-in” ticket price, adjusted to 2017 dollars, fell from $632.92 in 1979 to $350.41 in 2005 — a decline of 45 percent, according to data aggregated by the trade group Airlines for America: see http://airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Business schools are the boot camps of the global meritocracy. In the old days, Oxford and Cambridge selected and trained a national elite often by teaching them English history and literature, or a distinctively English style of analytical philosophy. Today, business schools select and train a global elite by teaching them about supply-chain management and globalization. Harvard Business School requires its students to spend time in emerging countries. INSEAD calls itself ‘the business school for the world’ and has campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi as well as Fontainebleau, France. Fuqua School of Business at Duke University boasts that it is ‘the world’s first legitimately global business school’; it has campuses in six countries.


pages: 624 words: 180,416

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

anti-globalists, barriers to entry, book value, Burning Man, company town, creative destruction, double helix, Internet Archive, inventory management, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, New Journalism, off-the-grid, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, printed gun, random walk, reality distortion field, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, time dilation, union organizing, wage slave, work culture

Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!” “All true,” Lester said. “But that didn’t stop these guys. There are still a couple of them around, limping along without many customers. They print the tags with inkjets, sized down to about a third the size of a grain of rice. Mostly used in supply-chain management and such. They can supply them on the cheap. “Which brings me to my idea: why not tag everything in a group household, and use the tags to figure out who left the dishes in the sink, who took the hammer out and didn’t put it back, who put the empty milk-carton back in the fridge, and who’s got the TV remote?


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Gras, N.S.B. An Introduction to Economic History. New York: Harper, 1922. Greis, Noel P., and John D. Kasarda. “Enterprise Logistics in the Information Era.” California Management Review 39, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 55–78. Greis, Noel P., Jack G. Olin, and John D. Kasarda. “The Intelligent Future.” Supply Chain Management Review 7, no. 3 (May 2003): 18–23. Güller, Mathis, and Michael Güller. From Airport to Airport City. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2003. Gutfreund, Owen D. Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hall, Edward N.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

But they too combined automation with the creation of new tasks. With the emphasis on flexible production and quality, Japanese companies did not automate all of the jobs on the factory floor, instead creating a range of complex and well-paid tasks for their employees. They also invested as much in software for flexible planning, supply-chain management, and design tasks as software tools used for automation. Overall, during the same time period, Japanese automakers did not reduce their workforces in the same way that their American peers did. In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, where collective bargaining remained important and a large share of the industrial workforce is still covered by collective agreements, corporations have continued to share productivity gains with workers, and automation has often been combined with other technological adaptations more favorable to labor.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

When Musk arrived at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, the Apple staff’s first impression was that he looked like someone who hadn’t slept well for weeks. They went into Cook’s conference room for a one-on-one session that lasted just over an hour. It began with them swapping supply-chain horror stories. Ever since the debacle of the Roadster production process, Musk had a deep appreciation for the difficulty of supply-chain management, and he considered, rightly, that Cook was the master. “I don’t think very many people could have done a better job than Tim has,” Musk says. On advertising issues, they reached a détente. Cook explained that protecting the trust surrounding the Apple brand was his highest priority. The company did not want its ads to be in a toxic swamp filled with hate, misinformation, and unsafe content.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

For almost a year Jobs ran operations himself, because all the prospects he interviewed “seemed like they were old-wave manufacturing people,” he recalled. He wanted someone who could build just-in-time factories and supply chains, as Michael Dell had done. Then, in 1998, he met Tim Cook, a courtly thirty-seven-year-old procurement and supply chain manager at Compaq Computers, who not only would become his operations manager but would grow into an indispensable backstage partner in running Apple. As Jobs recalled: Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Even a greatly advanced SI won’t make a dramatic difference in the world when compared with billions of augmented humans increasingly integrated with technology and with corporations harnessing human minds linked together internally by future versions of today’s enterprise resource planning and supply chain management software, and linked externally by extranets, smart interfaces to the Net, and intelligent agents. How fast things change with the advent of greater than human intelligence depends strongly on two things: the number of superintelligences at work, and the extent of their outperformance. A lone superintelligence, or even a few, would not accelerate overall economic and technological development all that much.


pages: 351 words: 102,379

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

After attending the Browning School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Jamie studied psychology and economics at Tufts University; later, at Harvard Business School, he developed a reputation—as much for his arrogance as for his intelligence. Just a few weeks into the fall semester of his first year there, the professor in an introductory class on operations was going through a case study on supply chain management at a cranberry cooperative. Midway through Dimon stood up and interrupted him with, “I think you’re wrong!” As the startled professor looked on, Dimon walked to the front of the class and wrote the solution to the supply problem on the blackboard. Dimon was right, the professor sheepishly acknowledged.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

The new high-tech workforce of the Third Industrial Revolution will need to be skilled in renewable energy technologies, green construction, IT and embedded computing, nanotechnology, sustainable chemistry, fuel-cell development, digital power grid management, hybrid electric and hydrogen-powered transport, and hundreds of other technical fields. Entrepreneurs and managers will need to be educated to take advantage of cutting-edge business models, including open-source and networked commerce, performance contracting, distributed and collaborative research and development strategies, and sustainable low-carbon logistics and supply-chain management. The skill levels and managerial styles of the Third Industrial Revolution workforce will be qualitatively different from those of the workforce of the Second Industrial Revolution. A fully integrated intelligent intergrid allows each country to both produce its own energy and share any surpluses with neighboring countries in a “network” approach to assuring global energy security.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

3125 We were much more self-sufficient in 1918.3126 Since our global economy is now built upon just-in-time inventory control, companies have minimal stockpiles of raw materials or finished goods.3127 Modern corporations no longer have warehouses brimming with months’ worth of inventory. Grocery stores rarely have more than a few days’ supply of popular goods stored, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association has been pushing for even tighter inventory restrictions. The chief executive of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals told The Wall Street Journal that food retailers “can’t afford a just-in-case inventory.”3128 The threat of a bad winter storm can lead to regional shortages of key commodities;3129 imagine those shortages dragging on for months.3130 With COVID-19, though the toilet paper supply may have been wiped, food has continued to flow.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Such flexibility might allow us to differentiate, for example, when the discursive structure of the relational database drives not only the information access policies of a company or state, but also in turn the form of its organizational hierarchies, and when the inverse is predominantly true, such as when the laws and logistics of trade channels structure the form and content of interoperable supply chain management software and the database designs on which it depends. In locating The Stack within the intercourses of economics, culture, and technology, both Conway's law (that organizations design systems in their image) and our inverse Conway's law (that systems and their interfaces produce organizations in their image) are interpretive tools that are useful to keep at hand.


Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques: Concepts and Techniques by Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei

backpropagation, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, cyber-physical system, database schema, discrete time, disinformation, distributed generation, finite state, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, power law, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, semantic web, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, supply-chain management, text mining, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, web application

This may not be effective, however, because many group-bys may have insufficient data and/or noise. A more general method uses the proximity of data objects in the space of contextual attributes. We discuss this approach in detail in Section 12.4. Collective Outliers Suppose you are a supply-chain manager of AllElectronics. You handle thousands of orders and shipments every day. If the shipment of an order is delayed, it may not be considered an outlier because, statistically, delays occur from time to time. However, you have to pay attention if 100 orders are delayed on a single day. Those 100 orders as a whole form an outlier, although each of them may not be regarded as an outlier if considered individually.


pages: 1,544 words: 391,691

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur, Antonio Salvi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, ASML, asset light, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, book value, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, delta neutral, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, impact investing, implied volatility, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, performance metric, Potemkin village, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

All of the above should set alarm bells ringing. These are, in fact, the financial statements for Enron, which went bankrupt with a big bang in 2001. Note 1 i.e. earn a rate of return higher than justified by risk. See Chapter 26. Bibliography For more about the economic analysis of companies: S. Chopra, P. Meindl, Supply Chain Management, 6th edn, Pearson, 2015. P. Kotler, P.K. Keller, Marketing Management, 15th edn, Prentice Hall, 2015. P. Marsh, The New Industrial Revolution, Yale University Press, 2012. B. Moingeon, G. Soenen, Corporate and Organisational Identities, Routledge, 2003. M. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Free Press, 1998.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Through Project Infinity, partly cloaked in Y2K spending, Coca-Cola turned the soft-drink business into a technology-fed numbers game. In 1999, the company hired 150 experts for worldwide implementation of SAP’s programs. SAP, an acronym for Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing, provided business software solutions for process redesign in supply-chain management, customer-relationship management, and resource planning. 28. Ivester did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. 29. Betsy Morris and Patricia Sellers, “What Really Happened at Coke,” Fortune, January 10, 2000. 30. Interview with Sharon Osberg. 31. Betsy Morris, “Doug Is It,” Fortune, May 25, 1998, and Patricia Sellers, “Crunch Time for Coke,” Fortune, July 19, 1999. 32.