If you’re in business, you’ve felt it. A nervous energy, a sense of instability that wasn’t there a few years ago. One day, your most reliable supplier is a perfect partner; the next, a sudden tariff threat turns them into…
In an increasingly interconnected but fragmented world, the old ways of matching buyers, sellers, and service providers are starting to break down. For decades, we relied on structured, database-driven systems to create efficiency, scale, and consistency. But as the global…
The Comfort of Thick Markets For years, America’s penchant for buying manufactured goods from China has occurred in what Nobel prizewinner Alvin Roth terms a relatively thick market. In thick markets: In thick markets, traditional database-driven systems like Alibaba, Global…
With the looming Trump Trade War in the background, I’ve been working through stuff I accumulated over the years and every so often, a forgotten nugget pops up. From 1985 to 1992, an automotive trade magazine (Chilton’s Automotive Industries –…
As the clock runs down to Jan 20 and the Trump inauguration, I’m having flashbacks to Feb 20ish, 2022, when the world was waiting to see whether Vladimir Putin really meant to invade Ukraine. At the time, many pundits offered…
AI Generated image of Donald Trump leading a herd of MAGA in a Gish Gallop
March, 2000 witnessed a crisis in the gun industry. I’ve been researching and teaching about business operations for 40+ years and I can’t think of any other industry-wide event that exhibited the sheer savagery of the gun industry’s collective public…
This is a reposting of a blog article and corresponding PDF White Paper that I wrote in April, 2015. Click the following image to view the original PDF White Paper in a popup window. [dflip id=”11161″][/dflip] Problem Statement Figure 1…
Please take a moment to watch a bit of the following video: A LOT of things in this scene might be worth measuring: The information to estimate answers to these questions is evident in the clip … but you have…
I was a late convert to Twitter. I dabbled about a year ago and then I discovered that Ukraine war news appeared there first. Everyone in the media, government and big business already seemed familiar with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok…