Global Shortages During Coronavirus Reveal Failings of Just in Time Manufacturing – The New York Times:

“Companies that run successful lean programs not only save money in warehouse operations but enjoy more flexibility,” declared a 2010 McKinsey presentation for the pharmaceutical industry. It promised savings of up to 50 percent on warehousing if clients embraced its “lean and mean” approach to supply chains.

Such claims have panned out. Still, one of the authors of that presentation, Knut Alicke, a McKinsey partner based in Germany, now says the corporate world exceeded prudence.

“We went way too far,” Mr. Alicke said in an interview. “The way that inventory is evaluated will change after the crisis.”

Because if you’re talking about some management theory that has gone horribly awry and resulted in chaos and/or tragedy, you know it’s not going to be long before the name “McKinsey” crops up.

Dan Pfeiffer, on why the Left needs to stop overreacting to every stupid and offensive thing that right-wing nutbars say:

I understand the impulse. Ted Cruz is incredibly annoying. He is one of the most transparently cynical human beings to walk the planet. If the two most annoying people in your high school class had a child, that child would be Ted Cruz. But every reply, quote tweet, and clever dunk aids them and gives them the thing they strive for most: attention. Every time someone yells at Cruz online, it makes him happy because it means his strategy is working.

Whether it’s Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, or the handful of Trump relatives who remain on Twitter, we must stop playing their game.

It’s time for liberals to stop being owned and start using their attention as a weapon.

I agree. Same goes by the Media Matters-fueled outrage about whatever the latest stupid thing some conservative state legislator has said.

I have gotten about twenty pages into Andy Weir’s new book, and I don’t understand how anyone can stand this guy’s writing.

This new release of Can’s 1975 show in Stuttgart is a great way to start my Friday and close out the week.

Office politics: A working letter:

I’ve noted before how phrases and concepts often “do work” beyond just what their presumed meaning might relay. The term “office politics” is one of those phrases. It turns an important part of the inner workings of an organization—how people negotiate power and authority—into a futile and dispiriting game that no one in their right mind wants any part of. It serves to disenfranchise people from participating in decision-making that affects their lives. It reduces politics to power-grabbing without any analysis of the consequences of who wields that power, and in doing so coats any discussion of political values in a film of disgrace.

It’s within that framing that proscriptions of discussing politics at work arrive, making it especially difficult to interrogate them. It’s trivially easy for those with more power to simply declare that political discussions are, by their very nature, unpleasant and pointless. But that declaration obscures the judgment of what counts as a political discussion.

Politics is the practical work of navigating, manipulating, and adjusting the power structures that our society has built up around us. Whether it is in the office or in everyday life, claiming that you “don’t do politics” is nearly always an indication that the current power structures are working in your favor and you are okay with that.

I actually laughed out loud when I got to the final line of this paragraph:

Eventually, Ms. Gladstone accused Mr. Garfield of “bathing in self-pity,” he recalled. He swore at her and slammed his computer shut, he said, calling the incident “an appalling abuse of an employee’s health prerogatives.” WNYC fired him for violating its anti-bullying policy, and he is starting a newsletter on Substack on Monday.

It’s from an NYT story about the kerfuffle at NPR’s On the Media. I don’t really care to get into the merits of the story; I assume that, no matter how pleasant he may seem on air Bob Garfield is—like all big-name media figures—probably an asshole.

Of course he is starting a newsletter on Substack, because that seems to be where all exiled media assholes go. It’s their business model. They’re like the Statue Of Liberty for media assholes.

Letter from Los Angeles – The Anxiety of Influencers, By Barrett Swanson | Harper’s Magazine:

Not to sound like an English professor or anything, but as a professor of English, I can’t help thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin suggests that fascistic governments aim to maintain the status quo by providing citizens with the means to express themselves aesthetically without reforming their lives materially. Thus the aforementioned government that Brandon thinks TikTokers have scared shitless actually, as Benjamin writes, “sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights.” More to the point, any countercultural voltage these influencers purport to possess gets nullified by the fact that they have clear incentives not to talk about controversial matters, lest they get dropped by their brands. “I don’t talk about politics at all,” Brandon says. “It’s like there’s always another opinion. It’s always better to be neutral. I feel like everybody avoids politics on social media. Besides that, though, everyone feels like they have a voice.”

Executives don’t decide if the company culture is good. Employees do. – Galaxy Brain:

People managing is fundamentally different from product managing or strategic planning. It’s messy and emotional and hard to quantify. There’s no way to do it efficiently, at least not in the way we’ve come to think of “efficiency,” because it’s hard to automate or streamline the process of listening to and understanding the humans who work for you.

I think #11 on this list is my favorite:

1. But mostly because it is NONE OF ANYONE’S GODDAMN CONCERN if you choose to keep wearing a mask. Fuck off! Mind your own business!