Erin Decker

Erin – This is great. Thank you for writing it. I hope we do get more mail in and online voting. If the internet is secure enough for me to file my IRS returns and for them to accept my payment… it should be secure enough for me to vote!

Erin – great thoughts on both the convenience and efficiency that online voting could bring. I am all for this – and agree, if we can submit our taxes, make payments, etc… securely – this is a logical next step.

What an amazing find, Erin. As COVID-19 has changed the dynamics of processes and operations for a number of companies, this seems like a natural fit – home delivery. However, the fact that they could be using driverless technology seems amazing. Just as we recently discussed Amazon Fresh stores without cashiers, this seems to be an innovation and growth area for companies.

Awesome post Erin! This would be a game changer, especially for folks who may not be able to get to the pharmacy easily. I’m sure the demand for prescription delivery is very high. It is also great that Nuro is no extra charge! I assumed there would be some cost tied to a delivery service like this. After your post I was interested in learning more about Nuro and found that the delivery window is expected to be within the hour of calling in the prescription. That is incredible.
I agree with you, having Nuro available during this pandemic would have been extremely helpful. I was happy to read that Nuro has been utilized during these last few months to deliver to food and medical supplies at temporary field hospitals in California in response to the COVID-19. I’m excited to see what’s to come in the future with this technology!

Great post Erin! Generally when I have a prescription ready for pickup at CVS, it takes at least 2 or 3 reminder texts to get me to pick it up – life is busy and it is easy to forget! Having a service like this would be a game changer, especially since there is no extra cost associated with it. Self driving car and truck technology is very interesting to me, and I think we will begin to see a prevalence of this technology over the next 5-10 years. Reading your post reminded me of an article I read last year about a startup company in Arizona that had partnered with UPS and had quietly been using self driving tractor trailer to deliver bulk mail shipments between two cities 120 miles apart. I think it is pretty cool that they had been doing this drive with relatively low publicity until they were able to say “we have been using self driving technology for months to make deliveries and no one noticed because everything has been going fine”.

Autonomous semi-trucks have been driving along I-10 for months and no one noticed

Nuro is a great find and would make an excellent addition to the case! What would the current process flow diagram look like with the introduction of Nuro?

Great informative article, Erin! I had no idea that Lyft is using self-driving cars already in Phoenix, I’d love to try one of those out myself. One of my favorite YouTubers has a Tesla, a self-driving car, and it’s crazy to watch him filming while driving, my first instinct is to be safe while driving & not use your phone but with the technology of self-driving cars, I guess it doesn’t matter as much. I wonder if the automation of driving will help cut back on accidents too, especially with tractor trailers. I’d love to see more driving automation if it helps cut back on traffic as well, especially living in the DC area!

That’s an interesting point that there might no longer be traffic in the age of self-driving cars. While I do enjoy the manual exercise of driving, it really is terrifying to think of how dangerous it is. It’s easy to just imagine the end result, in which all cars are at level 5 automation, so thinking about the transition brings up a lot of interesting issues. I hope the slow transition period brings increasingly safer transportation!

Great read, Erin! I think the idea of self-driving cars and the ability to help cut down traffic is very exciting! I don’t enjoy driving and I get very irritated when I have to drive long distances because I feel that my time could be better spent doing something else (e.g., reading or squeezing in a quick nap after work). Although rideshare apps are testing self-driving cars, I wonder if the emergence of self-driving cars that consumers own themselves would have any effect on rideshare profits. If consumers own self-driving cars, couldn’t they potentially be sleeping or intoxicated inside their own self-driving cars that would transport them to their destinations safely? Personally, if I owned a self-driving eco-friendly car, I wouldn’t see the need to use a ride-share service anymore as long as I was able to park the car safely and affordably upon arrival at my destination.

Great post, Erin! Studies have shown that there is also a financial benefit to having more gender diversity among decision-makers in business. A 2017 report by the Peterson Group, which examined more than 21,000 companies in 91 countries, found that companies with more than 30 percent female leadership can expect an improvement to their net margin of up to 6 percent.

Working in a state-funded university, we’ve been working on ways to inform and elevate our young female leaders to convince them that they belong in leadership. Only 37 percent of our business student population at UNI is female. This ratio causes issues as we try to provide the workforce with balanced gender representation. Although our Dean is committed to balancing the ratio to 50/50, we seem to be running out of time.

https://business.uni.edu/news-views/gender-games-women-are-still-fighting-equality-workplace

Great post, Erin! I agree, Jennifer Henley’s presentation really resonated with me (especially her anecdote about being asked to make dinner reservations and travel arrangements). I think there is still a lot of work to do in regard to gender inequality in the workplace, but I have hope. I saw a commercial over the weekend called She Can STEM which inspires middle school girls to stay in STEM by showcasing female role models (in this case from Boeing) across a variety of STEM fields. I thought it was very inspiring and influential.