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Working in a fast-food restaurant at a young age exposed Tara to fast-paced environments and diverse tasks. She optimized work processes by using checklists and time management strategies. Tara's initiative in refining systems led to a predictive ordering system that saved failing stores, significantly improving their profitability.
As a junior intern pharmacist, Tara identified inefficiencies in drug distribution at a hospital. She implemented systems to predict drug needs and prevent stock shortages, significantly reducing staff time spent on ad hoc drug requests. Tara's interventions enhanced patient care, saved costs, and improved hospital outcomes.
In Bhutan, Tara addressed major safety concerns in a cancer treatment center, including exposure to cytotoxic agents and dosing errors. She collaborated with international oncologists to improve dosing accuracy and patient safety. Tara's interventions mitigated potential fatal errors and enhanced treatment quality.
As CEO of an organization, Tara focused on building a strong company culture. She prioritized values-based decision-making, clear communication, and operational efficiency. Tara's emphasis on culture enhancement enabled effective teamwork, clarified organizational priorities, and fostered a positive and productive work environment at CEA.
Having skilled operations personnel is crucial for ensuring the smooth running of conferences and organizations. Operations professionals can predict potential problems, plan for contingencies, and optimize processes such as power distribution and crowd management. They play a vital role in reducing the risk of failure and catastrophic errors, making challenging projects feasible and ensuring successful outcomes.
Working in operations provides job satisfaction, opportunities for learning and skill development, and career capital. An operations role offers flexibility to work across various industries and to take on roles with significant responsibility. It also cultivates problem-solving, social, and political skills, emphasizing the importance of understanding systems and people interactions. Despite challenges, pursuing operations can lead to diverse experiences and valuable career opportunities.
How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s life, the answer seems to be ‘very’.
At 15 she took her first job - an entry-level position at a chain restaurant. Rather than accept her place, Tara took it on herself to massively improve the store’s shambolic staff scheduling and inventory management. After cutting staff costs 30% she was quickly promoted, and at 16 sent in to overhaul dozens of failing stores in a final effort to save them from closure.
That’s just the first in a startling series of personal stories that take us to a hospital drug dispensary where pharmacists are wasting a third of their time, a chemotherapy ward in Bhutan that’s killing its patients rather than saving lives, and eventually the Centre for Effective Altruism, where Tara becomes CEO and leads it through start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
In this episode Tara shows how the ability to do practical things, avoid major screw-ups, and design systems that scale, is both rare and precious.
Full transcript, key quotes and links to learn more.
People with an operations mindset spot failures others can't see and fix them before they bring an organisation down. This kind of resourcefulness can transform the world by making possible critical projects that would otherwise fall flat on their face.
But as Tara's experience shows they need to figure out what actually motivates the authorities who often try to block their reforms.
We explore how people with this skillset can do as much good as possible, what 80,000 Hours got wrong in our article 'Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism’, as well as:
* Tara’s biggest mistakes and how to deal with the delicate politics of organizational reform.
* How a student can save a hospital millions with a simple spreadsheet model.
* The sociology of Bhutan and how medicine in the developing world often makes things worse rather than better.
* What most people misunderstand about operations, and how to tell if you have what it takes.
* And finally, operations jobs people should consider applying for, such as those open now at the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: search for '80,000 Hours' in your podcasting app.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.
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