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The podcast episode delves into Tara McAulay's history of diving into problem-solving approaches, significantly enhancing organizational capabilities. Her journey from managing a fast-paced restaurant to transforming struggling stores demonstrated her operational aptitude and the ability to optimize workflow, predict customer needs, and boost profitability.
Tara McAulay's impactful healthcare initiatives, such as optimizing hospital workflows and improving medication stocking methods at a hospital, resulted in cost savings and enhanced patient care. By implementing data-driven solutions and innovative strategies, she successfully addressed inefficiencies and improved patient outcomes.
Her experience in Indonesia and Bhutan highlighted challenges in healthcare operations, including the need for improved medication dosing accuracy, overcoming cultural barriers to communication, and ensuring patient safety. Tara's efforts aimed to enhance healthcare delivery systems and address critical gaps in treatment protocols.
Transitioning to a leadership role at the Center for Effective Altruism (CEA), Tara McAulay applied her operational expertise to streamline processes, enhance organizational efficiency, and adopt a strategic approach to decision-making. Her journey from problem-solver to COO exemplifies her ability to drive impactful change and foster a productive organizational culture.
Focusing on building and maintaining a strong company culture based on shared values was highlighted as crucial by the speaker. By involving all staff in defining these values and integrating them into various processes such as hiring and feedback mechanisms, the organization established a foundation for decision-making and ensuring alignment with its goals.
The podcast emphasized that operations work goes beyond just enabling other functions but is a unique skill set in itself. Good operations personnel can identify bottlenecks, suggest creative solutions, and significantly impact the organization's qualitative work. The ability to foresee challenges and optimize processes enables operations staff to make projects feasible that might have seemed impossible.
Working in operations was portrayed as offering both job satisfaction and highly transferable skills. The role provides opportunities for learning, diverse tasks, and autonomy in decision-making. Additionally, the podcast highlighted that operational competencies, including problem-solving and decision-making abilities, are valuable in various career paths beyond operations roles, making it a versatile skill set to develop.
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2018.
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.
Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.
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.
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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Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode