Great Lufthansa Flights and Great to be Back in Sweden

Lufthansa must have been using machine intelligence to figure out seat assignments.

On  my flight from Boston Logan to Frankfurt this past Thursday I was seated to a student from the business school at UMass Boston and then across the aisle from me there was a faculty member from the MIT Sloan School of Management.  The former was traveling to the University of Heidelberg where she will be studying German and learning about the culture with her ultimate goal of working in international business as a CPA. The MIT instructor, in turn, was traveling to Istanbul, Turkey (his first trip there) for a short workshop.

From the UMass Boston student I learned about her various experiences at universities she had been at (including horror room-mate stories)  prior to transferring to UMass Boston. From the faculty member I caught up on what MIT has been doing in terms of entrepreneurship.

And  there were several other female students on our flight to Frankfurt who were also going to the program at Heidelberg, including an Isenberg School of Management student from the Management Department.

The Lufthansa staff was fabulous -- danke schon -- and the flight with 58 rows of seats was filled. I enjoyed the Airbus airplane with bathrooms down the stairs -- good way to stretch and get some exercise.

I also met a female postdoc from Portugal who is researching neuroscience at Harvard Medical School who was traveling back to Portugal for a vacation and a family from Nantucket who was going back to White Russia to visit relatives and they were traveling with two very young children.

I had a pleasant wait in the Frankfurt airport, where Lufthansa even provided the latest USA Today and International Herald Tribune for the travelers, and then it was time for a short (under 2 hours) flight to Gothenburg.

Now I am back in my office at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, drinking my cafe latte, and enjoying being back in glorious Gothenburg, Sweden.

I have prepared the lecture on supply chains that I will be giving this coming Monday at the Chalmers University of Technology, as part of its Optimization Seminar series. In my talk, I will provide a broad overview of some of the work that we have done on supply chains and then will delve deeply into our latest work on fast fashion and sustainability -- perfect since I am now back in the world of H&M.