Blackstone Media Blog

One of the most exciting things I learned this semester at UofL was in my Business Management Mathematics course. I’ve always been obsessed in maximizing my own time and trying to make daily tasks more efficient, not only at work, but at home. The problem is, to fully understand behaviors you have to track them from an objective viewpoint. This is a tedious process as those of you already know who use Basecamp. And, once you have finally collected all the data, you have to dissect it, and piece it back together. Which, can be very time consuming (and brain numbing.) Matter of fact most businesses (and people) rarely get to this point, as when you have 20 projects shooting down the pipeline your thinking turnovers rather than maximizing the processes.

This is where the Simplex Algorithm comes in. It was first designed to help coordinate the production, shipment, and drop off of the supplies to soldiers in WWII. Today the airlines use it to route planes and crews, phone companies use it to design telephone networks, oil refineries use it to decide how to mix gasolines, and large farms use it to plan crop production. The Simplex Algorithm has saved businesses billions of dollars, and it is estimated that about 75% of all computer time used by businesses (not ours) is used to solve linear programming problems.

We are going to use the simplex algorithm to maximize processes at Blackstone. What one person can do another can do better (yes the competition is high) and through this software we can automate the calculations to understand who does which task the fastest or to see who completes the tasks that end up generating the most profit (quality).

It is a very interesting tool and I cant wait to see the results as it is always quite shocking to look at yourself from an objective viewpoint to understand what are your strengths and what are you weaknesses as we tend to think one thing in our minds while our actions tend to show things differently. To throw a monkey wrench into the equation the final thing to think about is which variable to maximize for. Time? Profit? Or to the tasks which provide you with the most utility?

Well I’ll tell you that I’ve maximized for satisfaction before and that rarely gets ya to where you want to be. So the question is, can you look at yourself from an objective viewpoint? Or better yet are you ready to listen to someones subjective opinion?

But in the end its all its all about perspective anyway right?