How to build safe and efficient systems. The Merchant Navy’s Top 6 Lessons for Tech Leadership [Storytime Saturdays]
The scale at which they operate can teach you a lot about running operations at scale.
Hey, it’s your favorite cult leader here 🐱👤
On Saturdays, I will cover stories/writeups covering various people’s experiences 📚📚. These stories will help you learn from the mistakes and successes of others. These stories will cover various topics like Leadership, Productivity, and Personal/Professional Development. Use these to zoom ahead on your goals 🚀🚀
To get access to all my articles and support my crippling chocolate milk addiction, consider subscribing if you haven’t already!
p.s. you can learn more about the paid plan here.
As a land dweller, it can be easy to forget about shipping. Most of us don’t realize it, but this is a crucial industry. The global merchant fleet in 2020 shipped 2 Billion Deadweight Tons. Without shipping, modern supply chains would not exist. The components of the device you’re using to read this article were all shipped across oceans to be assembled together.
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Capt. Ravi Budhwar, a captain works in the Merchant Navy. Captain Budhwar has spent many years on the seas and is an expert in all the intricacies of Maritime Trade and shipping. And he had some very interesting insights to share about shipping and its unique operations.
A middle-sized ship can weigh over 90,000 tons and is on the water constantly for months on end.
The crew on board has to encounter challenges such as rough weather, constantly changing seascape, 24-hour navigation, and changing time zones. If the ship has problems mid-voyage, repairs can be challenging. Most impressive is how they can manage all this with small crews (the average size of the crew on these ships is between 20 and 30).
The conversation about the scale of his operations and the efficiency of his crew had me very interested in the systems that made this possible. I wanted to know how the ships and the industry had created systems to solve such complex problems. In this article, I will be covering some of the key ways that the merchant navy is able to run its operations across multiple nations, cultures and time zones while running trillion-dollar operations.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Technology Made Simple to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.