It was the 1950s and General Electric was the largest appliance manufacturer in the US. In one of their factories in Kentucky, the managers were struggling with what seemed to be an intractable problem – there were times of the year when the factory would be working 3 or even 4 shifts, and then there... Continue Reading →

18th century Europe was a particularly exciting time if you were in the seafaring business. There were multiple ventures, several with vast capital investment attempting some very bold goals (most of these ventures would be outright illegal or egregious by today’s standards or ethical standards of any age – colonial ambitions, slave trade et al.... Continue Reading →

Imagine this: you are going to the theater for a movie (in a post-covid world!) and you enter the parking lot. You have to make a choice as you drive towards the theater: do you pick the first open spot that you see (which means you have to walk longer and might miss the opening... Continue Reading →

I am currently reading ‘Enemy of all Mankind’ by Steven Johnson. It is a fascinating story of a pirate .. and in the introduction, he writes the main motivation behind the book: “we tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming through deliberate planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure,... Continue Reading →

Last week, I talked about ‘perfection being the enemy of good’ in problem-solving. However, what if we swing the pendulum to the other extreme and draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence? In other words, are we susceptible to ‘narrative fallacies’? In ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahnemann describes a (now famous) thought experiment that he and... Continue Reading →