James Drogan

Following is a brief exchange between a student in the current capstone course and me.

Me

Increasingly, it seems, the competitive arena is shifting in the direction of correct decisions at an increasingly fast pace whilst delivering increased value to the customer.  A ship or port, no matter how modern, deep of draft, and large of area, will loose out if it is slow of mind and action; or, if in the acceleration of decision making it tramples on customer service.

This suggests a premium on organization and control systems.  The technology and other hard assets may be the easy part.  Conceiving and designing new systems involving the fundamental redesign of work in the port and terminal may be what provides a competitive edge.  This is what smart people do aided, of course, by smart machines.  Advances of this nature will likely require new terms of engagement amongst various parties.

Student

Professor I completely agree with you. There might be a belief that technology can just come and take the place of so much and make things easier but it goes deeper than that. In fact, more efforts are needed now almost to re-invent the wheel from a technology standpoint. I was just having this conversation with my colleagues the other day about our supply chain system that was implemented about 4+ years ago and how to this day we are constantly trying to re-design it to meet the standards of customer service that should provide. So much has to be visited, so much to be taken into consideration, we are truly dealing with a different animal this day and age.

From John Mauldin, October 3, 2014.

Second, I could see my own thought process evolving and realized again how truly important it is to continually test your ideas in the marketplace.

From Dobbs, R., Ramaswamy, S., Stephenson, E., & Viguerie, S. P. (2014, September). Management Intuition for the Next 50 Years.

Change is hard. Social scientists and behavioral economists find that we human beings are biased toward the status quo and resist changing our assumptions and approaches even in the face of the evidence. In 1988, William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, economists at Boston University and Harvard, respectively, highlighted a case in which the West German government needed to relocate a small town to mine the lignite that lay beneath. The authorities suggested many options for planning the new town, but its citizens chose a plan that looked “extraordinarily like the serpentine layout of the old town—a layout that had evolved over centuries without (conscious) rhyme or reason.”

Businesses suffer from a surprising degree of inertia in their decisions about how to back up strategies with hard cash to make them come to fruition. Research by our colleagues showed that between 1990 and 2010, US companies almost always allocated resources on the basis of past, rather than future, opportunities. Even during the global recession of 2009, this passive behavior persisted. Yet the most active companies in resource allocation achieved an average of 30 percent higher total returns to shareholders annually compared with the least active. The period ahead should raise the rewards for moving with agility and speed as digitization blurs boundaries between industries and competition in emerging markets heats up.