If you sell computers or cars, learn to hold more chips and boards. Etc.
And learn to manage counterparty risk up and down your value chain. Companies are eager to have their partners to take on all inventory risk in JIT ways. Do the opposite.
Conversation
This also means learning to retarget inventories on the fly. If you speculatively stocked up on some parts and the world changes and blows up your downstream, learn to sell off the parts elsewhere. Every inventory point is a potential sales point in some future.
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Remember how early in pandemic many restaurants were selling their own inventory as groceries? That should become a routine habit to some extent. Retargeting inventory from any WIP state from inputs to outputs as a core competency.
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Another angle: neoliberalism got asymmetrically better at thawing frozen assets into on-average more liquid ones than freezing liquid ones into frozen ones. Frozen assets (rightly) became a slur pointing to old-money rents captured and held with regulatory cronyism.
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“Frozen assets” is a misnomer.
“Frozen” = on average more liquid in a larger set of futures
“Liquid” = on average more liquid in a narrower set of futures
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My much less developed thinking on this from pre-Covid times:
From 2016, when I started thinking about this: Fat Thinking and Economies of Variety
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Feb 2018, this is sort of my rough synthesis GUTS: The Grand Unified Theory of Striving (or Slacking )
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I did try to market it a bit back then, but few bites. I got one short corporate talk out of it, and I attribute one fun new gig to it. But fat thinking just wasn’t a popular line of thought until last year.
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Even where people did seem interested it was mostly financial fatness. As in hold a lot more cash on the books, take more investment than you need if you can do it in no/low dilution ways and retain control.
“Deep fatness” was an unpopular idea.
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I keep pushing for running a little bit fatter at my current company and I keep getting “lol never” from every VP+ person, which is cool
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I don’t blame them. Nobody knows how to manage for fat so it becomes suffering and virtue instead of rationality.
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I think the problem I have is that there are so few clear spaces to make land grabs in mobile games, so making a team where one departure leaves you totally screwed makes no sense to me. But maybe the incentives lean so far against this that it’s hopeless

