Category Archives: Operations Management

Book Review- Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

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Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, 2011

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Highly recommended. Gives tips on why you are so cranky at the end of the day. Hint: willpower depletion and decision fatigue. You have a finite supply of willpower, and it won’t be replenished without food or sleep. The book has useful long-term strategies on how to conserve willpower by creating routines, setting plans with to-do lists, and creating if-then rules for eating, drinking, and behaving. Relatively quick read, with lots of references to behavioral research.

Book Review- Creativity, Inc.

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Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace, 2014

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A combination biography/business advice book from the co-founder of Pixar and president of the Disney/Pixar Animation merger. Catmull describes his unending quest to promote creativity at Pixar and avoid the pitfalls that success can bring. I really like Pixar movies, which drove me to the book. I really like the advice given in the book, but wouldn’t suggest the book for those who want to read about the Pixar movies. Pixar is just the setting in which the advice is explained, and the amount of details and insights into the workings of animators is limited.

The last section offers a summary of the advice in the book, and is easily quotable:

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.

If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.

Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.

Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.

Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95% who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5%– address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.

Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something ewe should continually work on– but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

INFORMS Annual Conference 2015 Recap

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cropped-INFORMS_banner_logo_annual_meeting31

I thought the conference went relatively well. I was very busy, with an energy talk on Sunday, sports poster on Monday, healthcare talk on Tuesday, and call center talk on Wednesday. All the talks went well and were pretty well attended (20-30 at each).

Maria was able to attend the conference as well, and she attended a mix of information systems talks and sports talks. We explored Philly on Saturday (Halloween), seeing the art museum (Rocky steps), Love sculpture, and Ben Franklin statue/museum during the day and doing a ghost tour at night (saw Independence Hall). Philly has a lot of history, but seems like not a great city nowadays. We had a few cheesesteaks, but couldn’t make it out to the famous cheesesteak venues.

One promising development from the conference was the SpORts business meeting. It’s good to see the section getting back on its feet, with plans for the future.

Healthcare Conference at IU

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The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University hosted a Healthcare Conference on “Patient-Centric Healthcare Management in the Age of Analytics” last Friday and Saturday. I was able to attend on Friday and enjoyed the conference. Special thanks go out to Kurt Bretthauer for organizing the conference and special issue of POM attached to the conference. There were over 70 talks, with 2-3 parallel tracks allowing for 15 minutes/talk.

A couple interesting talks to me:
A group from the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (Elham Torabi, Craig Froehle, and Christopher Miller) are looking at the triage of patients classified to be “level 3” on the ESI triage scale. The simplest cases of those patients could probably be seen in the Fast Track, alleviating strain on the emergency department during busy times. This dovetails nicely with my work on triaging patients calling EMS for an ambulance transport.

A group from the College of William and Mary and the Bon Secours Health System (Jim Bradley, Chalit Fernando, and Rajiv Kohli) used survey data to identify patient perceptions of hospitals. The data are strongly correlated, making typical regression models difficult, so the group uses PCA in their exploratory analysis to reduce the dimensionality and correlations in the data. The principle components are then incorporated into a stepwise regression to determine the appropriate model. While I wasn’t particularly interested in their problem, I thought it was cool that PCA and stepwise regression were being used together. I haven’t seen either of them used in an operations management paper lately.

Game Theoretic Baseball Catching

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I heard about Zack Hample and his thousands of game balls many years ago. Now he has over 8,000 and caught A-Rod’s 3000th hit (a home run) this year.

You might be able to increase your odds by moving to areas of less competition, even if it’s an area where fewer balls are hit.

Some of Hample’s suggestions:

1. Hample suggests going to batting practice before the game begins and finding an empty row with aisle access. You want to be able to move both left/right as well as up/down in the seats so you can cover more room (around 5:25 in the video).

2. Learn foreign languages! Now this is thinking creatively. Baseball players often toss balls up to fans if you ask them nicely. Hample figured that foreign players would be more receptive if he asked in their native tongue. He’s learned how to ask “can you throw me a baseball” in over 30 languages (around 6:45 in the video).

3. Look at ESPN’s home run tracker. You can look up any player or any stadium to see where home runs are hit in a scatterplot. There are statistical patterns so you can choose your seat accordingly to increase your chances of catching an important home run (around 6:10 in the video).

(via Mind Your Decisions)

How to Win

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From a 2004 paper by Gaba et al:

If a contestant has the opportunity to modify the distribution of her performance, what strategy is advantageous? When the proportion of winners is less than one-half, a riskier performance distribution is preferred; when this proportion is greater than one-half, it is better to choose a less risky distribution. Using a multinormal model, we consider modifications in the variability of the distribution and in correlations with the performance of other contestants. Increasing variability and decreasing correlations lead to improved chances of winning when the proportion of winners is less than one-half, and the opposite directions should be taken for proportions greater than one-half. Thus, it is better to take chances and to attempt to distance oneself from the other contestants (i.e., to break away from the herd) when there are few winners; a more conservative, herding strategy makes sense when there are many winners.

Applications to academia:

For example, if a school wants to be more innovative and nurture high-risk, high-payoff “big ideas,” it should decrease p (of tenure) for junior faculty…
There are also implications regarding the type of individual who might join the organization. For example, consider a new Ph.D. entering academia with a choice between a school with moderate research expectations and reasonably high p (of tenure) and a top research school with low p but greater rewards associated with winning the tenure contest. An organization wanting to minimize the chance of very low performance and/or to attract people who prefer to stay on well-trodden paths should set p high, whereas an organization wanting to increase the chance of especially high performance (at the cost of an increased chance of especially low performance) and/or to attract people who are competitive and like the challenge of striking off in new directions should set p low.

INFORMS 2015 Presentations

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Presentations I will be giving at INFORMS 2015, Nov 1-4:

1. Cluster: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Sustainable Operations
Session Information : Sunday Nov 01, 13:30 – 15:00
Session Title: Incentives and Investment in Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency

Title: Demand Response, Energy Efficiency, And Capacity Investments In A Production Line
Presenting Author: Eric Webb,Graduate Student, Indiana University
Co-Author: Owen Wu,Indiana University
Abstract: Demand response (DR) programs incentivize industrial firms to halt production during times of peak electricity demand. We consider a firm faced with the option of investing in energy efficiency (EE) improvements at individual machines on the production line. When viewed in isolation, EE incentives may not be enough to induce the firm to invest in the socially optimal level of EE, due to the loss of DR revenue after installation. We suggest a new policy for EE incentives in light of DR.

2. Cluster: Manufacturing & Service Oper Mgmt/Healthcare Operations
Session Information: Tuesday Nov 03, 16:30 – 18:00
Session Title: Patients and Practice: Using the Right Resources to Deliver Care
Title: Incentive-compatible Prehospital Triage In Emergency Medical Services
Presenting Author: Eric Webb,Graduate Student, Indiana University
Co-Author: Alex Mills,Assistant Professor, Indiana University
Abstract: The Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system is designed to handle life-threatening emergencies, but a large and growing number of non-emergency patients seek healthcare through EMS. We evaluate the incentives underlying prehospital triage, where EMS staff are allowed to identify patients that could be safely diverted away from the hospital and toward appropriate care. Continued transition from fee-for-service payments to bundled payments may be necessary for prehospital triage implementation.

3 (I will be presenting). Cluster: Behavioral Operations Management
Session Information: Wednesday Nov 04, 08:00 – 09:30
Session Title: Behavioral Models in Operations Management
Title: Linking Customer Behavior And Delay Announcements Using A Probability Model
Presenting Author: Qiuping Yu,Assistant Professor, Indiana University
Co-Author: Kurt Bretthauer,Professor, Indiana University
Eric Webb,Graduate Student, Indiana University
Abstract: Service systems often offer announcements to customers about their anticipated delay. We empirically examine how announcements affect queue abandonment behavior using a duration model accounting for potential behavioral factors. Our results show announcements induce the reference effect and customers exhibit loss aversion. We also find evidence indicative of the sunk cost fallacy. We then provide insights for staffing and delay announcement policy accounting for observed behavioral factors.

4 (poster). Title: Using Past Scores and Regularization to Create a Winning NFL Betting Model
Presenting Author: Eric Webb, Graduate Student, Indiana University
Co-Author: Wayne Winston, Professor, University of Houston
Abstract: Is the National Football League betting market efficient? We have devised a profitable betting model that would win 52.9% of the 7,554 bets against the spread it would have made over 33 seasons. Scores from previous weeks are used to estimate the point value of each team’s offense and defense. These values predict next week’s scores, and a bet is placed against the advertised spread. The sum of squares of offensive/defensive point values are constrained to be less than a regularization constant.

My poster will be presented 12:30-14:30 on Monday, Nov. 2, so I have presentations every day of the conference. Come see me!

Book Review- It Works

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It Works
by Melvin Evans, 1946

it works
(I’m not sure if the cover really looks like this. My copy is really from 1946 and doesn’t have a dust jacket.)

This book will make you a better person. It’s written by an “industrial executive and management engineer” who has moved on to studying human engineering. His book is filled with suggestions for doing better at work, at home, and in the community. It’s refreshing to read a book founded on good morals and Christian virtues. You don’t read much written with this sort of vigor anymore. Reading it just made me feel good.

The last chapter quotes the Gettysburg address, a plan for peace from a Chinese peasant, and a prayer from the author’s daughter: “God, give us the strength and willpower today to do the things we know we should do for Thee, but so often lack the courage.” The book praises democracy and the American way profusely. The three parts of the book are “E Pluribus Unum- Teamwork”, “In God We Trust- Faith”, and “Liberty- How It Works”. Throughout, there are calls for people to do things the right way with the right intentions, in order to generate good results: It Works!

Spring 2015 Schedule

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6 half semester seminars

First half of semester:
Monday, 3-6pm: Healthcare Operations Management (OM) from Jonathan Helm
Tuesday, 1-4pm: Emerging Areas in OM from Ruomeng Cui
Thursday, 1-4pm: Recommender Systems (an Information Systems course) from Jingjing Zhang

Second half of semester:
Monday, 1-4pm: Empirical OM from Qiuping Yu
Tuesday/Thursday, 4-5:30pm: Information Economics from Dmitry Lubensky
Thursday, 1-4pm: Operations Planning and Scheduling from Kyle Cattani

All courses are reading-heavy. I will probably be assigned about 10-15 papers to read each week.