In the middle of a serious and excellent presentation on the supply chain "efficient frontier" - really supply chain tradeoff curves, with a few wrinkles - at the Logility user conference last week in San Diego, Sean Willems, Chief Scientist at Logility, found a way to introduce some excellent comic relief into his material.

Willems said that right at the end of many lecture when he was teaching at Boston University and more recently MIT, right at the end of class he would ask students to quickly write down two things: a key point they have learned from that day's lecture, and one question that they still have from the material.  He said that doing this right at the end of class forced students anxious to move on to the next thing to just put down the first thing at the top of their minds, without a lot of mental analysis - useful and interesting feedback.

One day, he does this at the end of a lecture on calculating optimum inventory levels. The responses on the one question the students still have included the following gems:

We don't know about you, but we laughed at all of these. And we think we need to include more humor in the serious field of supply chain, which is why we started our monthly supply chain cartoon caption contest and Chain Reaction cartoon series.

Thanks to Willems for this funny stuff. And since it is that simple in the classroom, why doesn't everyone just do it?