Warehouse Team Quotes

As a teenager with morbid proclivities, my only real social outlets in Hawai’i were the gothic and S&M fetish clubs with names like “Flesh” and “The Dungeon” that took place on Saturday nights in warehouses down by the airport. My friends and I, all uniform-wearing private-school girls by day, would tell our parents we were having a sleepover and instead change into black vinyl ball gowns we ordered off the Internet. Then we’d go to the clubs and get tied to iron crosses and publicly flogged amid puffing fog machines. After the clubs closed at two a.m. we’d go into a twenty-four-hour diner called Zippy’s, invariably get called “witches” by some confused late-night patrons, wash off our makeup in the bathroom, and sleep for a few hours in my parents’ car. Since I was also on my school’s competitive outrigger canoe paddling team, the next morning I would have to peel off the vinyl ball gown and paddle in the open ocean for two hours as dolphins leapt majestically next to our boat. Hawai’i is an interesting place to grow up.

In 1994 very, very few people had heard of the internet. It was used at that time mostly by scientists and physicists. We used it a little bit at D. E. Shaw for some things but not much, and I came across the fact that the web—the World Wide Web—was growing at something like 2,300 percent a year. Anything growing that fast, even if it’s baseline usage today is tiny, is going to be big. I concluded that I should come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it and keep working to improve it. So I made a list of products I might sell online. I started ranking them, and I picked books because books are super unusual in one respect: there are more items in the book category than in any other category. There are three million different books in print around the world at any given time. The biggest bookstores had only 150,000 titles. So the founding idea of Amazon was to build a universal selection of books in print. That’s what I did: I hired a small team, and we built the software. I moved to Seattle because the largest book warehouse in the world at that time was nearby in a town called Roseberg, Oregon, and also because of the recruiting pool available from Microsoft.

All right,” she said. “Inductive reasoning. It’s what those so-called detectives on CSI, SVU, LMNOP and all the rest of them call deductive reasoning, which is wrong and they should know better. It’s inductive reasoning, a tool you will use frequently in geometry as well as calculus and trigonometry, assuming you get that far and that certainly won’t be you, Jacquon. Stop messing with that girl’s hair and pay attention. Your grade on that last test was so low I had to write it on the bottom of my shoe.” Mrs. Washington glared at Jacquon until his face melted. She began again: “Inductive reasoning is reasoning to the most likely explanation. It begins with one or more observations, and from those observations we come to a conclusion that seems to make sense. All right. An example: Jacquon was walking home from school and somebody hit him on the head with a brick twenty-five times. Mrs. Washington and her husband, Wendell, are the suspects. Mrs. Washington is five feet three, a hundred and ten pounds, and teaches school. Wendell is six-two, two-fifty, and works at a warehouse. So who would you say is the more likely culprit?” Isaiah and the rest of the class said Wendell. “Why?” Mrs. Washington said. “Because Mrs. Washington may have wanted to hit Jacquon with a brick twenty-five times but she isn’t big or strong enough. Seems reasonable given the facts at hand, but here’s where inductive reasoning can lead you astray. You might not have all the facts. Such as Wendell is an accountant at the warehouse who exercises by getting out of bed in the morning, and before Mrs. Washington was a schoolteacher she was on the wrestling team at San Diego State in the hundred-and-five-to-hundred-and-sixteen-pound weight class and would have won her division if that blond girl from Cal Northridge hadn’t stuck a thumb in her eye. Jacquon, I know your mother and if I tell her about your behavior she will beat you ’til your name is Jesus.” The

After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in years that they have a president who takes his role as Commander-in-Chief seriously,” a White House aide bragged. “They’re ecstatic.” Amid Vietnam, Watergate, and a relatively calm period of the Cold War in general, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had shown little interest in the emergency procedures, which for the most part had continued to chug along far off the White House’s radar. Carter’s administration, on the other hand, ran the only full-scale activation of the Greenbrier congressional relocation facility—on cue, the Forsythe Associates team hauled hundreds of desks out of their warehouse on the resort grounds and—while the conference facilities were closed to the public—set up the exhibit hall as if Congress had successfully relocated there. Outside the small Forsythe Associates crew, none of the resort guests or staffers noticed. •

Located on 9th Avenue in New York City, B& H Photo is the largest non-chain photo and video equipment store in the United States and the second largest in the world —only Yodobashi Camera in downtown Tokyo is bigger. The owners, along with many of their employees, are Hasidic Jews who dress just as their eighteenth-century ancestors did in Eastern Europe. On any given day, 8,000 to 9,000 people pass through the front door. Yet 70 percent of their business is online, serviced by a 200,000-square-foot warehouse located nearby in Brooklyn. Even in a competitive marketplace, B& H won’t conduct business on the Sabbath or on about a half-dozen Jewish holidays during the year. They close their doors at 1 p.m. on Fridays and keep them closed all day Saturday, the biggest shopping day of the week. During Sabbath, customers can peruse the B& H website, but they can’t make an online order. Recently a customer asked the B& H director of communications how they could close not just the retail store but also the website on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year. The director simply replied, “We respond to a higher authority.” 17

Economics and P&L What are the per-unit economics of the device? That is, what is the expected gross profit and contribution profit per unit? What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product? How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, and so on? For this section of the PR/FAQ, ideally one or more members of your finance team will work with you to understand and capture these costs so you can include a simplified table of the per-unit economics and a mini P&L in the document. A resourceful entrepreneur or product manager can do this work themselves if they do not have a finance manager or team. For new products, the up-front investment is a major consideration. In the case of Melinda, there is a requirement for 77 people to work on the hardware and software, for an annualized cost of roughly $15 million. This means that the product idea needs to have the potential to earn well in excess of $15 million per year in gross profit to be worth building. The consumer questions and economic analysis both have an effect on the product price point, and that price point, in turn, has an effect on the size of the total addressable market. Price is a key variable in the authoring of your PR/FAQ. There may be special assumptions or considerations that have informed your calculation of the price point—perhaps making it relatively low or unexpectedly high—that need to be called out and explained. Some of the best new product proposals set a not-to-exceed price point because it forces the team to innovate within that constraint and face the tough trade-offs early on. The problem(s) associated with achieving that price point should be fully explained and explored in the FAQ.

Cultures in scaling startups can fracture in two ways. First, “old guard versus new guard” conflicts may arise if early team members resent the growing power of specialists or some new employees’ lack of initiative and commitment. Recent hires, in turn, may be jealous of early employees who’ve amassed enormous stock option gains (“That engineer in the next cubicle does the same thing I do, and she just made $5 million”). Second, as specialists are added to the staff and their units expand, functions can develop their own subcultures. Employees may feel a stronger sense of attachment to their functional unit—say, marketing or warehouse operations—than to the venture overall.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

Enterprise Data Warehouse Bus Matrix The enterprise data warehouse bus matrix is the essential tool for designing and communicating the enterprise data warehouse bus architecture. The rows of the matrix are business processes and the columns are dimensions. The shaded cells of the matrix indicate whether a dimension is associated with a given business process. The design team scans each row to test whether a candidate dimension is well-defined for the business process and also scans each column to see where a dimension should be conformed across multiple business processes. Besides the technical design considerations, the bus matrix is used as input to prioritize DW/BI projects with business management as teams should implement one row of the matrix at a time.

The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and have even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and, as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat. The ceiling hangs high above, ribbed like an airplane hangar. The floor is a maze of tall metal shelves loaded with boxes, canisters, containers, and bins. Simple enough. But the shelves—the shelves are all moving. For a moment I feel sick, because my vision is swimming. The whole facility is writhing like a bucket of worms; it’s that same overlapping, hard-to-follow motion. The shelves are all mounted on fat rubber tires, and they know how to use them. They move in tight, controlled bursts, then break into smooth sprints through channels of open floor. They pause and politely wait for one another; they team up and form long caravans. It’s uncanny. It’s totally “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” So the iPad’s map is blank because the facility is rearranging itself in real-time.

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I silenced my phone and walked down to the fifth floor of Trump Tower, which once housed the set of The Apprentice. It was now a large, open, warehouse-style room, with some tables and chairs and a portable basketball hoop in the center, which had been brought in by campaign aides as a way to blow off steam. I grabbed a ball and shot by myself for a while

So our CORE PROPOSITION was: ‘This was an opportunity to acquire currently cutthroat competing businesses at distressed values where an immediate uplift in value would be derived from (a) the reduction in competition and (b) the synergies from joint purchasing, IT warehousing, and management.’ Seven warehouses would be reduced to three, two merchandising teams to one and two finance teams to one.

In a subsequent study, this time in New York City, Pager and her colleagues fielded teams of White, Black, and Latinx testers to apply for real entry-level jobs. The testers were articulate, clean-cut, college-educated young men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, similar in height, physical attractiveness, verbal skill, and interactional style and demeanor. The Latinx testers were US citizens of Puerto Rican descent and spoke without a Spanish accent. The testers were trained to present themselves in similar ways to potential employers as high school graduates with steady work experience in entry-level jobs. They applied for jobs in restaurants and retail sales, as warehouse workers, couriers, telemarketers, stockers, movers, customer service representatives, and other similar jobs available to someone with a high school degree and little previous experience. In applications to 171 employers, the White testers received a positive response (interview or job offer) 31 percent of the time, the Latinx testers received a positive response 25.2 percent of the time, and the Black testers, 15.2 percent of the time. Stated differently, the Black applicant had to search twice as long as the equally qualified White applicant before receiving a callback or a job offer.22

Hubert Joly, a former strategy consultant and most recently CEO of Carlson, a hotel and travel conglomerate, took on the challenge. Recognizing the dire circumstances, Joly and his team devised a plan they dubbed Renew Blue. The core idea was to create more customer value by increasing WTP and improving price perception. Rather than thinking of Best Buy’s more than 1,000 stores as a liability that made it difficult to compete, the company reimagined their role and turned them into assets. Going forward, the stores would serve four functions: points of sale (the traditional role), showrooms for brands that built stores-within-a-store, pickup locations, and mini-warehouses.