Its been 2 full weeks since our Comm 101 class took place with the unexpected but pleasant visit and lecture by Prof. David Silver. He is a man who is very knowledgeable about business ethics and coorporate social responsibility, and so I expected him to focus on those. Instead, he started off with a question, ” What did you hire Sauder to do?” My head simply interpreted that as “what are the qualities of Sauder, UBC” and started thinking up answers.
He gave the analogy of hiring a milkshake – one that I only understood thanks to this blog. The post took excerpts of an actual business research undertaken by McDonald’s, where researcher Gerald Berstell examined the people going into McDonald’s to buy milkshakes. He noticed that a majority bought them in the mornings; alone; to go. With that, he asked why these people bought the milkshake, what was it they needed getting done – why did they hire it? Once he discovered that the customers wanted something sate their boredom and hold of the hunger until noon, the qualities of the milkshake were easy to pinpoint and the improvements to be made could be accurately targeted.
The story of hiring a milkshake proved that asking the right questions is as important as interpreting the right answers, whether it be in business, in class or in life. “What did you hire Sauder to do?” took me by complete surprise, because we never phrase questions that way and it manipulated the perspective for more insightful answers. I believe that this is asking such questions will prove to be part of the bridge between my goal and my achievements.
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