I have great memories of McDonald’s breakfasts from my time as an undergraduate student. Ordering McDonald’s breakfast at 3:45am was a tradition on weekends and during study weeks. For ~10 Singapore dollars, I’d get a sumptuous breakfast and enough calories to take me through most of the day.
Those memories take me back to McDonald’s from time to time. Every time I dig into my McBreakfast, I feel that flood of great memories join me.
Yesterday’s trip was made extra special, however, thanks to a complete absence of plastic cutlery. I’ve since learnt that McDonald’s has been at work (example) attempting to replace all plastic cutlery, straws, and packaging with sustainable materials (more). They’re also going to be testing fiber lids, reusable cups, and the like with the goal of being 100% sustainable by 2025 – with strong progress made so far.
This is huge.
Here’s why – when McDonald’s introduced apples into the “Happy Meal” for kids in the early 2000s, the chain instantly became one of the largest buyer of apples on the planet. Decisions made by a behemoth like McDonald’s shapes entire industries and has ripple effects everywhere. Industrializing sustainable cutlery could make it possible for smaller chains to switch too.
It is awesome to see the McDonald’s team play a leading role here. I’m hopeful we’ll see a lot more progress in the coming months.
In his newsletter, author Steven Johnson shared a thought provoking post on the topic of “Getting to Scale.”
A lot of what I’ve written about the pandemic has focused on the things that we have managed to get right, compared to past outbreaks: the speed with which we identified and sequenced the genome of the virus, the miraculous development of safe and effective MRNA vaccines, the fact that billions of people around the planet made profound adjustments in behavior to flatten the curve.
But the rise of Omicron and the imminent FDA approval of the Pfizer antiviral Paxlovid are, in slightly different ways, reminders of something that we should get much better at—namely, the hard logistical and operations work of scaling. We have miraculous vaccines, but the longer it takes us to vaccinate the entire planet, the more opportunities there will be for new variants to emerge.
And while Paxlovid looks to be the most significant new advance in the fight against COVID since the vaccines, its production ramp is not going to be fast enough to have any real impact on the Omicron wave.
As Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago: “Pfizer says it’ll have about 180,000 packs of Pavloxid by the end of 2021 and then a very rapid ramp up to 21 million in the first half of next year. Those are large numbers, but they are not that large relative to a world population of seven billion or even the 630 million people worldwide who are over 65.”
In last week’s post about serendipitous discovery, I wrote a little about the classic story of Alexander Fleming, accidentally discovering penicillin after leaving a petri dish exposed on his desk during a two-week vacation. I briefly touched on the Fleming story in the book version of Extra Life, and my co-host David Olusoga did a wonderful recreation of it in the TV version. But in both the book and TV show, we emphasized a completely different part of the penicillin story, one that generally gets far less coverage than Fleming’s Eureka moment at the workbench: the extraordinary multinational and multidisciplinary effort to scale production of penicillin in time to get it to soldiers on the frontlines of WWII.
I’ll spare you the details of the story, but suffice to say that it was a far more complex and heroic task than simply stumbling across a curious mold in a petri dish. It involved creating crazy, jury-rigged production systems to test the drug on a single subject; a daring flight across the Atlantic with most of the world’s supply of penicillin in a single briefcase; squads of soldiers dispatched around the world to find other molds that might reproduce more efficiently; a team of agronomists in Illinois who were experts at growing mold in corn steep liquor; and Pfizer’s mass production facilities in Brooklyn. All leading up to one extraordinary result: In 1941, there wasn’t enough penicillin in the world to keep a single human suffering from a bacterial infection alive; and yet just three years later, when Allied soldiers landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, they were carrying penicillin packets as part of their standard gear.
It’s an amazing story, and one of the things that struck me researching it is how strange it is that the Fleming narrative is vastly more familiar to most people. And I think that’s because we romanticize—and thus invest in—discovery, and tend to ignore—and thus underfund—scaling.
I thought it was striking that Operation Warp Speed—which did a superb job at developing effective vaccines, and a terrible job of actually getting them to people—was originally dubbed MP2, shorthand for Manhattan Project 2.0. According to Politico, then HHS Secretary Alex Azar rallied the troops by saying, “If we can develop an atomic bomb in 2.5 years and put a man on the moon in seven years, we can do this this year, in 2020.”
As is so often the case, when we reach for examples of heroic scientific achievement, we turn to the familiar legends of military breakthroughs or space travel, and not the far more relevant example of actually making a drug that saved millions of lives. If they’d code-named the vaccine crunch P2, after the penicillin project, it might well have reminded them that inventing a life-saving medical invention is only half the job; you need to get it into people’s arms or mouths on the scale of millions for it to make a difference.
So to my mind, one of the lessons of this pandemic is that we need as much innovation in the approval/production/distribution side of the equation as we do in the lab science that conjures up mRNA vaccines or antivirals like Paxlovid. There are many potential ways of doing this, from challenge trials during the early days of development, to a more aggressive use of the Defense Production Act, to investing in excess production capacity that can be switched on for future crises—to other ideas that no one has thought of yet.
And if we’re going to have role models for what we’re trying to do, much better to lean on stories where we mass produced millions of drugs, instead of making a handful of bombs or sending three guys to the moon.
Steven Johnson makes a powerful point about the importance of scaling. As more new data about Omicron trickles in (confirming (a) its insanely fast spread, (b) lower severity, (c) strong booster protection), I find myself feeling grateful for the creation of the vaccines.
Clearly, I need to be just as grateful for all the work done to scale production and distribution.
A good friend observed that it is easy to deprioritize self-care because of an absence of immediate/short-term consequences.
This is true for many of the most important things in this life.
That, then, is the question we all need to answer in our pursuit of a good life – how do we ensure we prioritize stuff that matters – even when there are no immediately observable consequences?
“Don’t compare yourself to others – especially not their virtual selves.
There is a difference between a front stage and back stage self. Sometimes the people who put forth the most perfect front stage self are those whose back stage self is falling apart. Lots of airbrush.” | Brad Stulberg
I was renting a car recently. The friendly lady at the counter of the Dollar/Thrifty car rental added a fuel pre-payment charge after giving me a brief overview.
I asked her a couple more questions and realized it wasn’t something I wanted. So, I asked for it to be removed.
“Unfortunately, the system doesn’t let me do that.”
The solution was to wait until drop off. At drop off, I had to bring back an acknowledgment/confirmation of a full tank of gas from the representative back to the counter. It was fine in the big scheme of things – just an extra 10 minutes (factoring in time in a queue).
But, the exercise reminded me of a metric that I think would be particularly helpful for product teams to measure – easy of cancellation. This would require everyone on the team to know the answer to the question – how easy is it for a customer to remove a charge/cancel a subscription/close an account?
Small improvements in our systems translate into large improvements to the customer experience.
I heard a songwriter describe his relationship with the voice memos app on his phone. He said he kept recording ideas for songs but rarely went back to use them.
He found that the best of ideas had this way of coming back to him.
I’ve heard writers describe their relationship with the notes app similarly. They keep taking ideas down. But, they end up ignoring most of the ideas.
Why is that?
On the one hand, it speaks to the importance of saying no to good ideas as part of the creative process. So, it is expected most ideas are not used.
But, on the other, this habit of taking our ideas down – in my eyes – is a mark of the respect we afford to our ideas. When our mind gives us something, we say – “I see you, I acknowledge you” – by taking the idea down. That acknowledgment tends to encourage more ideas.
I have spoken to a few folks whose (US based) employers are planning a Q1 reopening. Some of these employers have signaled a return to the office in Jan. Others are scheduling large group events in the first quarter of 2022.
All of this made perfect sense pre-Omicron.
We’ve been here before as well. In May, we felt a surge of optimism in the US. Vaccines were being broadly deployed. Everyone was expecting to be back in the office in September. Then Delta hit.
If past patterns are anything to go by, I think we’re going to see the same thing happen with Omicron. All Q1 re-opening plans are going to be delayed with the expected Omicron related spike in the middle of January.
While the data is early, signs seem to point to Omicron being more transmissible (or at least better at evading existing immunity). And, there are positive signs that it is less lethal – especially among folks who’ve received a booster (The data is constantly getting updated – so, I’m just going to link to Eric Topol’s excellent Twitter account).
Learning from past patterns, Omicron will likely not be the last mutation. So, some of these reopening plans may be pushed back a few times. The unpredictability isn’t going away anytime soon.
All of this won’t make it any easier for the immunocompromised and the elderly unfortunately. But, thanks to vaccines, boosters, and soon-to-arrive anti-viral pills, we’ll hopefully become better and better equipped to deal with this evolving pandemic.
It just won’t happen overnight. And I think we’re better off setting those expectations for ourselves.
