As most people know, the US government was sent into shutdown when the House could not agree on certain issues revolving around healthcare. While the idea of a “government shutdown” sounds alarmingly like the premise of yet another disaster movie, this shutdown looks a lot more like a bunch of old men sitting around and twiddling their thumbs. Meanwhile, while life remains pretty much unaffected for most of these politicians, almost every public service has been entirely shut down, which is definitely an operations problem, and an economic one as a whole.

For example, major public landmarks such as New York’s ever famous Lady Liberty is unavailable to the general public because the US government has decided to cease functioning. This not only means a lack of revenue from tourism to the iconic statue, it also means that several people that find employment in the large droves of traffic the statue gets are currently unemployed.

Space frontier explorers and the stuff of dreams NASA has sent home 97% of their employees, halting all the research, development, building, and general work done by the program. Operations managers are inevitably going to have to deal with crisis management and attempting to fasttrack the progress of these developments in order to reach the goals set in place at the targeted time.

When the shutdown ends and Congress gets back on track, I think it’s be interesting to see how operations managers will deal with all the delays in progress for all of the affected systems, programs, and companies. This is definitely one to watch out for.

http://www.space.com/23014-nasa-government-shutdown-effects-obama-statement.html

is a sentence that you hardly hear from anyone. As we learned in the comm marketing class, campaigns need to establish key things like points of parity, points of difference, and frames of reference in order to be successful. These are simple, straightforward, and pretty much basic to every marketing campaign. After learning of this, I began to think of these points while watching ads on TV or online, and this particular one caught my attention.

DeLites is an Australian brand of snack crisps, like Triscuit but with cool accents and kangaroos, and I bet you that you didn’t know that, even after watching the video. But I bet you still want to buy it. I think what’s interesting about this video is the fact that it takes a very creative approach to stripping marketing down to the very very basics of its function: letting people know that it is a product worth buying. DeLites doesn’t bother with saying that it is equally as delicious as Triscuit, nor do they assert that their flavors are more unique than other brands; they simply assert that their product is desirable enough to warrant the silly things people will do for them. I definitely think this is a successful marketing campaign, and it just goes to show that breaking the rules and thinking outside of the box is worth it if you know what you’re doing.

Meanwhile, the marketing guys at Klondike are beating themselves up for not thinking of this themselves.