Information, Inventory and Knowledge

Toyota made the just-in-time style of inventory management world famous: all the pieces came together exactly when they were needed. Which sounds like common sense at first: after all, if the pieces came earlier than they were needed, you had to find a place to store them (that costs money and could lead to excess inventory); and if they came later, well, you were going to be late. What Toyota really gets the credit for is for having devised (and executed) a system that managed to achieve this in real life.

Shane Parrish points out that we’ve now taken the same just-in-time approach towards information:
“We really seek out signal is when we need it the most: right before we make a decision.”
Which of course can be very dangerous: you act based on what you get your hands on instead of trying to get the big picture. And you don’t have the time to reflect or analyze thoroughly.

On the positive side, Parrish points out that:
“If we can’t connect the current situation to something we already understand, we might reason that it is not in our circle of competence and thus we shouldn’t be drawing conclusions. If we can, however, connect it to something we previously understood then we’re less likely to draw conclusions on the basis of “this time is different.”

To which I would add: just-in-time information is the easy (lazy?) way. Or as Nick Carr’s put it:
“Knowledge seems such a drab thing beside the fireworks of its simulation.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJuly 15, 2016 at 8:30 PM

    When I read your mentioning Toyota which implemented "all the pieces came together exactly when they were needed", I appreciated it. Toyota could do it in Japan, where people have a mindset which ensures such things can be done. I don't thing other nations would dare to venture into that kind of thing - if at all, Germany may be able to work it out that way, but even they would not prefer it.

    I pondered over your point, “We really seek out signal is when we need it the most: right before we make a decision”. For decision making data/information are no doubt required. Strangely it is not the whole thing. I know about people who zero in on decisions, often right and sometimes wrong too, fairly quickly (what I mean is without going on vacillating). They are of course not the same as those who take rash and not-contemplated decisions. I also know people who are better at vacillating than decision making. And, for all their checking, re-checking and demanding more data and all, their decisions taken after all the hullo-bullo are not any wiser than those taken by "decisive" people. There is something intuitive about the decision making process for one thing, there is also a factor of inner strength (courage or whatever you other term one may think of) which guides for another.

    Finally, even vacillating people are not such a poor lot. Really pitiable people are those who cannot quit worrying after decisions are made, or, who cannot come out of the rut of non-stop-regrets when some decisions go wrong. Poise is all about facing the consequence of one's decisions. It requires "manliness" (I mean by that word 'the ability of accepting oneself and facing the outcomes of one's decisions without going into blame game' I do not mean any gender orientation when I use the word. Women are equally capable of the same quality of inner strength).


    These kind of things cannot be supplied by data and information.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more