Jennifer Tapias Derch
Life Lessons from Operations Management
The discipline that makes companies run better can help you too.
- By
- July 31, 2025
- CBR - Operations Management
What do you think about when you hear “operations management”? The way you answer this question likely depends on your exposure to and experience with this academic discipline, which is my area of expertise. Perhaps this is the first time you’re hearing of it, in which case you might not think anything at all. Or perhaps you’ve taken some classes in it, in which case you might be familiar with some concepts, such as limited resources and capacity or decision-making under uncertainty. Or maybe you know the discipline only through its reputation for being math intensive and technical, which may sound challenging to you and not fun.
There are multiple ways to answer the question, and there are life lessons to be drawn from each potential answer. Let me explain.
Be mindful of your infrastructure
Operations management is the study of business practices that maximize efficiency and productivity in an organization. If you didn’t already know that, your answer to my opening question—“What do you think about when you hear ‘operations management’?”—may be “Nothing.” This answer would make operations specialists celebrate because it is actually the goal of a successful operations team to have their work go largely unnoticed.
For example, how much time do you spend noticing traffic lights? Probably not a lot, until one is out and you are stuck at an intersection. Traffic lights aren’t sexy, but they are important. We need that infrastructure to be able to go places.
There’s a personal lesson to be drawn from this. You, too, have infrastructure, which takes the form of friends, daily routines, your office setup, and the other people and systems that collectively strengthen your ability to reach your goals. Remember this infrastructure, and take care to maintain it. And as you are thinking about your goals—whether they have to do with pursuing your career, changing the world, or doing something else significant to you—remember that sexiness does not equal importance.
Know your priorities
Perhaps your answer to the question is instead, “Limited resources and capacity,” which is the textbook answer from class. Operations management is fundamentally about using the resources a business has available in as efficient a manner as possible to provide goods and services to as many customers as possible. The availability of resources dictates capacity, or the maximum number of customers a business can handle.
You may be wondering, ‘What does this technical explanation of sample paths have to do with me and my life?’ The answer is: Everything!
The issue is that resources are always limited and, as a result, capacity is never infinite. There is always a trade-off. Do I spend more money on resources to increase my capacity and expand my business, or do I exercise caution and refuse to take on the loan that would be required for expansion? The answer depends on the goal. Am I prioritizing growing my customer base or am I prioritizing fiscal restraint?
This is how things work in life, generally. There are many decisions, and they always involve trade-offs. You can make life decisions the same way we make business decisions in an operations management class: Start by knowing what is important to you, and be clear about your priorities. Then use that knowledge to guide your life decisions.
Let go of hindsight
Let’s say that you’ve taken a few operations classes or perhaps work in the field. In this case, the initial question may make you think about how to make resource and capacity–allocation decisions under uncertainty—as such decisions in business are almost always made under uncertainty. Suppose Business XYZ must decide whether to prioritize Customer A or Customer B without knowing how much each customer values the service the business provides. The business decides to prioritize Customer A based on a logically sound analysis of the available data. However, as a result, it loses Customer B.
But let’s now imagine that Business XYZ, before making its decision, had accessed an oracle who was able to see the future and share, correctly, that Customer A would be willing to patiently wait for service.
With this information, the business would have known that the better decision was to prioritize Customer B. Customer A would have waited for service, and no customers would have been lost. The problem is that Business XYZ did not actually have access to an oracle, so it didn’t know how long each customer was willing to wait. Despite the bad outcome, if we were to evaluate Business XYZ’s decision in class, we would say that it made the correct decision based on the knowledge it had at the time.
The technical term for the outcome of an uncertain scenario (such as the roll of a die) is sample realization. A more advanced concept is sample path, which adds the dimension of time. A sample path includes many uncertain scenarios that resolve over time (like the seven outcomes of a die rolled every day for the next week). I use the notion of sample path all the time in my research.
You may be wondering, “What does this technical explanation of sample paths have to do with me and my life?” The answer is: Everything! When you make life decisions, you do not know how the uncertainties you face will be resolved. And yet your decisions strongly influence how your sample path through life will evolve.
I suggest that you forget about the benefit of hindsight when evaluating your decisions. Instead ask yourself, “Did I make the best choice I could have, given the information available to me at the time?” Then, regardless of the outcome of your decision, either pat yourself on the back or learn from any mistaken logic.
Doing something hard can lead to a sense of accomplishment and deep satisfaction. A life without challenge would be depressing.
I encourage you to apply the same thinking process to cultivate empathy for others. Someone may be in a bad situation despite having made good decisions. This connection between the hard, quantitative evaluation of decisions and a call for empathy for our fellow man is a potentially counterintuitive connection, but an important one.
Take on challenges
A fourth answer to the question might be the University of Chicago’s unofficial moniker “Where fun goes to die.” This is because operations management courses are technical and math intensive. They are not generally thought of as exciting or sexy, despite the importance of smooth operations at companies and in everyday life.
When I asked ChatGPT how the university attained that reputation, it told me, “The University of Chicago earned the moniker Where Fun Goes to Die due to its reputation for intense academic rigor and a highly competitive intellectual atmosphere.” What ChatGPT did not tell me is that having academic rigor and an intellectual atmosphere is amazing! In my view, saying that operations management is a place “where fun goes to die” is a huge compliment.
The people around you can make you better. My UChicago colleagues are some of the most renowned experts in their fields. I want to live up to their standard of excellence, which is a scary but also wonderful proposition. If you’ve been a big fish in a small pond, it can be difficult to adjust to life as a guppy or minnow, but being the small fry can push you to grow.
Surround yourself with smart people, and be willing to let them debate you and fuel your desire to work harder and accomplish more. The explanation generated by ChatGPT makes sense at a surface level because rigor and competition is serious stuff. But tackling challenges is also fun—doing something hard can lead to a sense of accomplishment and deep satisfaction. A life without challenge would be depressing. So go out and put yourself in an environment that drives you to improve.
Do something you love
All four answers above are correct responses to the question I posed initially. But for me, the best answer is, “It’s what I love.” I love operations, and while I could try to articulate the reasons, that would be missing the point. I just do. I don’t love 100 percent of what I do every day, but I do love 60–80 percent of it, which is probably as much as is realistic to hope for. I get to spend most of my time thinking about things that I truly enjoy thinking about, in an environment that is right for me.
This is my parting life lesson: Spend your time doing what you enjoy, whether it’s operations or something else entirely. I hope that you can do this with infrastructure that supports your life priorities, with empathy for yourself and others, and in an environment that challenges you in all the right ways.
Amy Ward is the Rothman Family Professor of Operations Management and the Charles M. Harper Faculty Fellow at Chicago Booth. This essay is adapted from the speech she gave at Booth’s graduation ceremony for graduates of the Evening and Weekend MBA Programs, Sokolov Executive MBA Program, and Masters in Management Program.
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