Name: Sean Willems - On Teaching, Simplifying, and Optimizing by The Playbook, an MIT LGO podcast
Duration: 24 min 42 s
Description: Sean Willems shares his story on what led him to teaching, some memorable experiences he's had with operations consulting, and why optimizing his wardrobe has made all the difference. Sean is currently a visiting professor at MIT where he teaches operations management.

Elementals
At the Natches River outside Tieton, Washington

We walk up through sage and kindling, 
holding our breath in the heat
before we meet the river’s icy fax 
unrolling down from the glacier.

			    	      My three children
bind the day’s scrapes and burns with the water’s
cool cautery. Maybe the last time they’ll jump
into anything together, before the tattoos
collecting in their phones start to emerge 
onto their goosebumped arms, wind new skins
around their ankles, up to their legs and ribs. 

In the refracting thornbushes rippling on the water
I see the gardens they mean to till
upon themselves: 
                    a “sibling snake” across
their wrists wards off those beer drinkers downstream

pink cacti catch the oak leaves from the rocks

the stylized fur of flying cats retains
the nectar and dew we passed this morning—

queer pictograms they’re flying up the pole 
for those who know to read the flags. They want
out from between the dumb old opposites 
of fire and ice. Fiercely illegible, 
their whole selves signal through this light
in wavelengths flared beyond my sight.

Elementals

Robin Red-breast

They were utterly,
unquestionably not red: 
the pantry of English in the 1500s
a root-cellar with apples and roses
preserved in jars for the winter,
red the only thing available to name
this most plentiful of birds, an error
carried to North America to misname
an equally orange, unrelated bird.

In a time of plague, the robins’ vigor
seemed almost excessive, that spring
when they sprinted across streets emptied
of all except masked pedestrians
in the first bloom of COVID paranoia.

In our own cellar we had bedded
down for the season in rolls
of toilet paper, boxes of yeast,
everything in place for a year
or more of isolated plenty. 
But under the forsythia
and across the wormy yard,
the robins seemed to know everyone, 
side-eyeing jays and squirrels, freed
from the sudden death of cars and Roundup.

Each one had a faceted array
of rust and gray across its chest,
fluttering ten times for each breath
I held to molder inside my mask, 
if you could even call our breathing 
by the same name when robins fill
their air-sacs first, then their lungs,
oxygen flowing even through their bones
as they fly to chest-baring vantage points,
although they only sing from the ground.

[Photo credit: bryanpfeiffer.com]

Robin Red-breast

20 minute meditation to connect with your inner wisdom and gain insight for your current life. Relax your body to feel more spacious and do some "time traveling" to visit times of freedom in your life.

Freedom And Space Meditation

Visitation
March 2020

It started as Dad’s first Zoom birthday—
a big one, odometer thunking hard—
he & my mom a few miles away
but huddled on my laptop 
with a sad cake on each table
because all we knew was to keep away
& point the camera at each other,
when we saw their chandelier rattle
as a bat flapped through the room
& they ran screaming to call 
the Animal Warden (locked down too) &
told me to come now plague or no plague,
so I pulled up & googled “bat in the house”
& held the door open like we would
for Elijah, prophet half-expected
to drop in at Passover for some wine & 
bring redemption for all, 
& from the darkened house
I felt the bat fly past my face
into the weirdly warm drizzly night 
looking for the fruit of this new season.

Visitation

Skunk Cabbage

Looming up from a mossy stage
comes a horned headdress,
audience screaming as they glimpse
their death metal hero rising from below,
dry ice steaming and SKUNK CABBAGE
flashing in fat red lights,
the name a gas attack on everything lovely, 
this plant like a tiny Viking ship
surging onto the beachhead,
a whole squad of them pushing up 
the marsh’s guts with their
purple egg teeth, crowbars wedging 
apart this gray fatigued macrame 
of dead reeds to make way for bloody spring.

Skunk Cabbage

We’re back baby! And we’re ready to reveal the secrets behind generations of LGO success. Dive back into the vibrant LGO community and learn from each other.

Our first new episode will be released in the next few weeks, so, give us a follow, and tune in to hear some amazing stories.

Want to contribute your lessons to our playbook? Reach out to us at: playbook@mit.edu. Tune in, learn, and be inspired with 'The Playbook'!

LGO Playbook Returns!

This weeks episode discusses sustainability in aviation and what Boeing is doing to help drive change not only in airplane manufacturing, but aviation at large.

If you are interested in Cascade, it is now a publicly available aviation emissions analysis tool, please explore Cascade at: SustainabilityTogether.aero

Sustainability in Aviation with Ellen Ebner (LGO '15) Part 1

Off season

You dug up the dahlia tubers
and put them in shoeboxes 
to winter in the garage beneath
a drift of recycling. 

They were gnarled and stained,
narrow alien hands ready to play
a game of three-card monte:

which of us will be purple,
which of us will live again?

Off Season

This episode continues the sustainability in aviation and what Boeing is doing to help drive change not only in airplane manufacturing, but aviation at large.  We are diving into Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles.

If you are interested in Cascade, it is now a publicly available aviation emissions analysis tool, please explore Cascade at: SustainabilityTogether.aero

Sustainability in Aviation with Ellen Ebner (LGO '15) Part 2

Sean Willems shares his story on what led him to teaching, some memorable experiences he's had with operations consulting, and why optimizing his wardrobe has made all the difference. Sean is currently a visiting professor at MIT where he teaches operations management.

Sean Willems - On Teaching, Simplifying, and Optimizing

The Playbook invites leaders of global operations some of the world's largest and most innovative companies to share their strategies and mantras.

Sean Willems - On Teaching, Simplifying, and Optimizing

The Playbook, an MIT LGO podcast

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