When did you last spend time in the dressing room? E-Commerce has been shifting shopping of all kinds to the Internet, and during the pandemic, this shift expanded exponentially. Sears was the original catalog business model, but they found that people preferred brick and mortar shopping, and in 1997, when Amazon adopted the Sears Catalog business model for the Internet, Sears closed their warehouses. But clothes shopping online can be a frustrating experience because of the absence of the dressing room. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with her colleague Dr. Ming Ma about the adoption of Virtual Reality to create an online dressing room experience.

Maj Ben Brooks returns to continue the conversation about disruption in law enforcement. Technology and information warfare have significantly impacted the role of law enforcement in our communities, but calls to “defund the police” and cries of “Black Lives Matter” have become weaponized narratives that thwart our ability to create meaningful change. On this episode of WMD Ben and Tammy continue their exploration of how understanding the impacts of cognitive overload, the attention economy, and how our brains work might help us get out of our land-locked canoe in the VUCA mountains. 

What does it mean to serve and protect? What does it mean to “police” a community? What it is like to be part of a “policed” community? We understand the importance of the rule of law and the concept of justice, but we are unclear exactly what that means. Law enforcement is lost in the wilderness of Mount VUCA as our society wrestles with these questions. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with retired Pennsylvania State Trooper, Maj Ben Brooks, to explore how technology, information warfare, and brain science might provide new insights related to officer safety and community safety.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been disruptive in so many ways, that it seems cliché to identify Covid as a disruptor of Christmas. Our hope was that with things returning to normal once the vaccines became available, that we can have a “normal” Christmas this year. But if “normal” is not a return to the pre-Covid status quo, what does a “normal” Christmas look like? And is “normal” overrated? On this episode, Dr. Tamara Schwartz looks back at the past year of adventures on Mount VUCA and explores the Christmas blessings of disruption.

Supply Chain disruption has been receiving considerable attention in the news. In fact, organizations who previously did not have “a logistics beat” have added expertise to their reporting teams. On the last episode of WMD we discussed the bullwhip effect in supply chains. On this episode, Tamara is joined once again by Dr. Mohammed Raja of the York College of Pennsylvania Supply Chain Management program, to continue the discussion of supply chain complexity and the many VUCA factors disrupting the global supply networks.

Back in the late ‘90s, Proctor & Gamble discovered that diapers were having a strange effect on the supply chain. Despite the relatively steady rate of diaper consumption amongst babies, the demand from retailers placing orders to the wholesalers demonstrated dramatic fluctuations, which were even more erratic when wholesalers ordered from P&G. This strange demand behavior, which was due to stockpiling at various levels within the supply chain, became known as “the bullwhip effect.” This VUCA phenomenon has been exacerbated in the present by the Covid-19 pandemic, the full impact of which we are just now beginning to really experience. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with colleagues Dr. Mohammed Raja and Dr. Matt Shatzkin of the York College of PA Supply Chain Management program.

Welcome to the Wilderness of Mirrors where nothing is as it seems, and all is just a reflection of some distant motive, actor, or ideology. Cyberspace is the land of anonymity, pseudonymity, and cognitive dissonance. A place rife with competition for power where threat attribution is, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult. In 1989, when Tim-Berners Lee proposed the idea of the World Wide Web, he was simply trying to make a day in his life easier. The response from his boss was “vague, but exciting.” Little did he know that Mount VUCA was starting to wake. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with her Infowars students about the World Wide Web and how it has disrupted reality.

On the last episode of WMD, “Daily News…Disrupted!” we talked with Dr. Renee Tacka of the York College of Pennsylvania about the impact CNN’s launch on the news cycle. We also explored the impact of the Internet on the delivery of printed news. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz continues the conversation with Dr. Tacka about disruption in the news media industry and how the Internet impacted not just the delivery medium, but what “news” content looks like. We also explore the disruptive impact of the mobile phone and social media not just on the news industry, but on human attention and the information ecosystem.

The late 20th Century was the heyday of Big Media. It was also the last time we had consistent information narratives in the national news cycle. Beginning with the launch of CNN in 1980, the world entered a 24-hour news cycle. A little over a decade later came the Internet, and a decade after that came the smart phone, each one disrupting the news cycle and the information environment a bit more, until another decade had passed and we find ourselves in the land of “choose your own news.” On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with someone who lived through the disruption and decline of the news industry, Dr. Renee Tacka, an Assistant Professor of Marketing from the York College of Pennsylvania.

Since the nation began to reopen this summer following wide availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, Main Street America has struggled to get back to pre-pandemic operations. According to 50% of small business owners across the country, in 2021 it has gotten more difficult to find qualified people to hire compared to one year ago. The labor situation is particularly challenging for the restaurant industry, affecting not only the ability to staff restaurants, but other parts of the industry value chain. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with George Papageorgiou, who is encountering these challenges first hand as he runs his family’s restaurant, New Freedom Restaurant in York, PA, and conquering Mount VUCA with his creativity and resilience.