There's a very fine line between Just In Time and Just Too Late. We advocate for Just In Case inventory, which is much more resilient.

Can you please share a little more about what Just In Case inventory looks like?

When MBA schools revise their curriculum.

Just in time works until it doesn't. For the last decade plus companies made outsized profit by squeezing their supply chains to the bare minimum.

Then covid hit and it all fell apart. Companies that had resilient supply chains made outsized profit during this time.

Companies are all about making bets on where they make more money. If you were in the hot seat to maximize quarterly profits would you make the first or second bet?

> When MBA schools revise their curriculum.

I chuckle because there is some truth to it. A real business survives by understanding the ground reality. MBA/spreadsheet business survives by trying to maximize shareholder value (often by mindlessly cutting costs) until it implodes on itself.

The market optimizes for efficiency, not robustness, right? Every engineer knows redundancy is the easiest way to add robustness (there may be better ways, but redundancy doesn’t require much cleverness). Every economist knows redundancy means you are about to be fired.

If they keep it up, the Houthis will discover that the US Navy has a just-in-time delivery all of its own.