Monthly Archives: August 2017

Rounding the Bases 20170825

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Longest suffering fan bases.

Interesting take on Kyrie Irving deal.

Baseball Is Overrun By Adam Dunns. Okay, here’s why: Analytics has helped defenses. Fielders have much more optimal placement/shift based on hitter tendencies. Pitchers pitch to hitter’s weaknesses and pitch to encourage a ground ball into the shift. Pitch framing catchers are being encouraged and used more often. How has analytics helped the hitter? He still has to hit a 90+ MPH pitch with his personal skill. So, to compensate for less success when the ball is put into play, hitters are going all-or-nothing to hit it out of the park. Hence, fewer balls in play and more “three true outcomes” at bats.

Book Review – The New Product Bet (Pre-Release?)

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The New Product Bet
by Nils Rudi and Serguei Netessine

This book is a multimedia approach to teaching how to choose order quantities for new, high margin products with long leadtimes. The book is supposed to accompany an app that has videos and other multimedia to reinforce the lessons. My review is only about the book part of the package. The writeup and accompanying illustrations of the newsvendor problem, along with suggested efforts to gather demand information and/or shorten leadtimes, were very good. It would be a great introduction to the topic for a new student or product manager. The length (about 140 pages with lots of illustrations, maybe the equivalent of 50 pages of normal text) was also short enough to be easily digested by its target audience.

I am not sure what stage this book is in. Serguei brought a bunch of unfinished versions to one of his presentations at INFORMS 2016 and left them for the audience. There are still some passages/charts unfinished in my version, and I did not have a password to try out the multimedia sections of the book. In googling, the book does not seem to be for sale yet, and the picture above is my own. I hope it gets published soon.

Book Review – Better Than Before

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Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of our Everyday Lives
by Gretchen Rubin, 2015

Listened to this book on tape with Maria. I think of this book as a more colloquial/conversational version of the book The Power of Habit. Some of the examples were engaging and I liked some of the emphasis on personality differences. We found out that Maria is a mix of habit personality types, with a strong emphasis on Rebel, which makes getting her to adopt a habit or conform to expectations difficult. I am a Questioner, meaning that I will only adopt a habit or conform to expectations if I think the habit/expectation is useful. It’s why I think New Year’s Resolutions are silly.

However, the book was just too long, and I ended up finding the author’s voice and writing style annoying. Authors, please do not do the audio for your own recorded books! Might be better in writing.

Energetic 20170817

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Bigger and bigger wind turbines.

Whereas 82 percent of offshore turbines ordered between 2001 and 2005 were under 3 megawatts, today there are no machines of that size on order.

Instead, 71 percent of orders are for products 5 megawatts or greater, and 16 percent are for turbines of 8 megawatts or greater. “Despite long project cycles and R&D timelines, commercial demand continues to favor the largest turbines,” says the report. “The next generation of 12-megawatt-plus turbines will gain market share within the next five years.”