Perspectives on Various Issues of Interest

Women's Changing Wish List

What I Want in a Man, Original List

1. Handsome
2. Charming
3. Financially successful
4. A caring listener
5. Witty
6. In good shape
7. Dresses with style
8. Appreciates finer things

9. Full of thoughtful surprises
10. An imaginative, romantic lover

What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 32)

1. Nice looking (prefer hair on his head)
2. Opens car doors, holds chairs
3. Has enough money for a nice dinner
4. Listens more than talks
5. Laughs at my jokes
6. Carries bags of groceries with ease
7. Owns at least one tie
8. Appreciates a good home-cooked meal
9. Remembers birthdays and anniversaries
10. Seeks romance at least once a week

What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 42)

1. Not too ugly (bald head OK)
2. Doesn't drive off until I'm in the car
3. Works steady - splurges on dinner out occasionally
4. Nods head when I'm talking
5. Usually remembers punch lines of jokes
6. Is in good enough shape to rearrange the furniture
7. Wears a shirt that covers his stomach
8. Knows not to buy champagne with screw-top lids
9. Remembers to put the toilet seat down
10. Shaves most weekends

What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 52)

1. Keeps hair in nose and ears trimmed
2. Doesn't belch or scratch in public
3. Doesn't borrow money too often
4. Doesn't nod off to sleep when I'm venting
5. Doesn't retell the same joke too many times
6. Is in good enough shape to get off couch on weekends
7. Usually wears matching socks and fresh underwear
8. Appreciates a good TV dinner
9. Remembers your name on occasion
10. Shaves some weekends

What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 62)

1. Doesn't scare small children
2. Remembers where bathroom is
3. Doesn't require much money for upkeep
4. Only snores lightly when asleep
5. Remembers why he's laughing
6. Is in good enough shape to stand up by himself
7. Usually wears some clothes
8. Likes soft foods
9. Remembers where he left his teeth
10. Remembers that it's the weekend

What I Want in a Man, Revised List (age 72)

1. Breathing
2. Doesn't miss the toilet

Online Professional Networking

The two most popular online professional networking sites, LinkedIn and Xing, have been growing at breakneck speed and boast 29m and 6.5m members respectively. And in contrast to mass-market social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, both firms have worked out how to make money. LinkedIn and Xing are similar in many ways. Both cater to youngish professionals with above-average income,  and allow people to connect, keep track of each other's activities and create groups of common interest. Both are also profitable since they help members find jobs or build their businesses, many users are willing to pay. Yet the two firms come from very different worlds. LinkedIn, was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman to manage his own business network. Funded by venture capitalists, it recently secured $53m of funding in a deal that gave it a valuation of over $1 billion. Xing comes from Germany, where it was founded in 2003 by Lars Hinrichs. It has relied on subscription fees since its launch, and it went public in 2006.

LinkedIn is chiefly about advancing its members' careers, even if many other things set a look in. A big chunk of its estimated annual revenues o $100m in 2008 is said to come from headhunters and companies, which pay to search LinkedIn database and contact its members. For Xing, although recruiting plays an important role, the site is more about networking. Members often meet offline. They also generate 80% of the firm revenue, which amounted to 16m euros ($24m) in the first half of this year. Half a million users pay a monthly fee of 6 euro ($9) to use the site. Xing's profit margin was 37% in the most recent quarter.

According to Forrester research, Facebook could be a potential competitor if it grows up and become a place to do serious business. American newspapers such as New York Times and Wall Street Journal are adding networking features to their websites. These are mainly meant for readers to stick around but could grow into professional social networks. Professional associations could also enter this sphere.

Source: "Facebook for suits." The Economist, September 27th 2008, pp. 76-77.

Trinity Health SCM Organization

Excerpts from the interview with Louis Fierens, Senior VP - Supply Chain & Capital Projects Management.

Approach to supply chain management:
"The cornerstone of everything that we do in supply chain is built around standardization of processes and data, creating market transparency and engaging stakeholders. We aspire to be a clinically driven supply chain, and the Trinity Health strategic sourcing process model is especially sensitive to clinical outcomes and impact on the care delivery process. So I would suggest that our approach is built on balancing the elements of quality, service, technology and price - much like most supply chain organizations."

Technologies utilized to organize supply chain transparency throughout all the different facilities:
"Our Supply Chain Information System is our backbone, it's our common item file, common supplier file, a single instance of supply chain supporting the enterprise. We have centralized requisition processing so our procurement all sits in one location nationally, processing orders. We have been implementing the system over the last three years in all our hospitals, and it will be completely installed by the end of the calendar year. We use handheld scanning to monitor inventory locations and automate our requisition and receiving processes. One of the things that's different from a manufacturing environment is we don't have predictable volume or frozen master schedule. This is because when you walk in the door of the hospital, to a large extent we don't know exactly what you're going to need. Our focus is around monitoring consumption as opposed to trying to forecast demand. Right now, we're working to move our consumption point of inventory closer to the patient bed. Overall, it's about creating transparency around spend, so we can better focus on higher areas of opportunity and ensure that every transaction that we have throughout the enterprise is documented, bringing accountability to the effectiveness of it. It creates an information foundation around supply standardization, as well as in a more mature state, allows us to link with the clinical system to understand the supply impact on outcomes."

Source: "Mission-driven Supply Management," Inside Supply Management, September 2008, Vol. 19, No. 9: pp. 26-29.

The Science of Management

1911 - Taylorism: A Philadelphia engineer named F.W. Taylor publishes The Principles of Scientific Management, a guide to increasing the efficiency of factory workers. His methods, known as Taylorism, dominate industrial work through much of the 20th century, from auto plants to McDonald's

1940 - Operations Research: Researchers in Britain and the U.S. build mathematical models of North Atlantic shipping lanes. Their goal: to find an optimized approach for getting convoys safely past Nazi U-boats. The result is operations research, a math discipline that now runs the logistis of the modern world including the development of cell-phone towers and helicopter routes in Iraq.

1950 - Statistical Process Control: W. Edward Deming begins teaching statistical management in Japan. His thesis: Meticulous control of quality also leads to lower costs. His methods contribute to startling advances in Japanese manifacturing which later spread through the world.

1986 - Six Sigma: Motorola institutes Six Sigma, a management strategy heavily influenced by Deming. It focuses on verifiable data, including consumer satisfaction and financial returns, It becomes the winning formula for GE and drives statistical managing into the ranks of office workers.

2005 - Modeling Workers: IBM embarks on research to harvest massive data on employees, and to build mathematical models of 50,000 of the company's consultants. The goal is to optimize them, using operations research, so that they can be deployed with ever more efficiency.

Source: Baker, S. "Management by numbers." BusinessWeek, September 8, 2008: pp. 32-38.