Month: November 2012

As the public turns more and more towards on-demand media, many media companies are struggling to find a way to replace the loss of advertisement revenue. So why is Disney not upset about their purchase of ESPN? According to the CFO of Disney, Jay Rasulo, “… 99.4% of sports events on TV are watched live.” This might help to explain how ESPN has grown into the economic giant it has; purchased in 1996 by Disney for $19 billion it is now valued at approximately $40 billion.

This is an excellent place to turn for solutions to the ever rising crisis of internet streaming and video recording, which are crushing the demand for advertisement space as it just is not as effective as it once was. The content ESPN shows is what gives it the capability it has. People do not want to watch the sports game an hour after it has played when people get around to uploading it online; people want to talk to their friends about the game and be able to wager on who will win. This sort of excitement would be near impossible to recreate in other areas of media, but may prove to be very valuable.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2012/11/09/why-espn-is-the-worlds-most-valuable-media-property-and-worth-40-billion/

Entrepreneurial work, both social and traditional, has been the focus of a few classes and several readings as well as playing a minor part in nearly every field covered in the class. This learning of the topic was reinforced with concrete examples of successful entrepreneurs, yet I am still very hesitant to consider entrepreneurial work as being suited for me.

When asked what part of a job is most important to us, most students answer growth potential (if my memory serves me). For me this is definitely a close second; without the ability to improve work becomes mind-numbingly repetitive. The most important portion of a potential future career, in my mind, is job security. I come from a very small family of modest means which consists primarily of labourers spanning generations back. It has been my understanding from a young age that there is nothing more important than being able to care and provide for those closest to you.

Entrepreneurship offers the possibility of leaving a mark on the world by introducing a revolutionary idea, but there is little to no job security. If your project fails the burden of expenses and forgone wages rests on your shoulders.

Daniel Pink is a BA holder from Northwestern University and a JD graduate from Yale Law School. A well-known writer and speaker he is best known for his work on the field of motivation, especially in the work force. In these two videos, Dr. Pink talks about two different types of motivation; intrinsic and extrinsic, and the effects they have on individuals. Denouncing the current reward system in place in most companies across the planet of “If you do this, then you get that.” as encouraging narrow-minded behaviour and shutting down creativity, Dr. Pink thinks it is far more effective to offer employees intrinsic motivation such as the feeling of autonomy and purpose in the work force.

There is debate on how modern society rewards the wrong behaviour unintentionally. If the manager maximizes sales, he might get a large bonus, but this does not necessarily maximize the company’s profits or adhere to their goals. These two presentations have made me wonder how Dr. Pink’s principals of proper motivation would apply to other aspects of life; do schools reward the wrong type of behaviour with the current grading system? How our learning is evaluated is based largely on our ability to produce specific information on exams and papers, rather than our overall understanding of the material.

Hurricane Sandy has been headline news recently, and with a forecasted $50 billion dollars in damage it is not hard to see the relation between it and the economy. A vault located in Manhattan containing “an estimated $36.5 trillion” worth of stock certificates and “custody certificates” was possibly damaged due to flooding. To get an idea of how large this value is, this is 3.20 times the public deficit America faced at the end of October 2012, or approximately $117 140.39 per American citizen.

               While the prospect of such a gargantuan sum of capital being ruined seems intimidating, the effects such damage would have would be dampened thanks to modern technology. Accurate computer records of all of the contents of the vault will greatly aid in the recovery process, as there are detailed reports on all of the documents which now face potential damage. Had this happened a few decades ago, the result would have been far more devastating. Even with the precautions which DTCC, the company responsible for the vault, have taken, the costs to them will be substantial.

http://buzz.money.cnn.com/2012/11/02/stock-certificates-sandy/

E-mail has become a major means of communication both between firms and within firms in modern society, and reasonably so; what is more productive than near-instant contact between an individual and his or her coworkers? Shayne Hughes saw a problem with this system though. He found that e-mails were failing to help employees communicate and were rather just giving them a way to pass work off on their coworkers until they subsequently passed it back. In an attempt to stop this behaviour, he blocked all internal e-mails within his company for a week.

The rationale behind this may not be clear at first; encouraging face to face communication and “sticky note” to-do lists seems counter-productive. Hughes raises some valid points however, and is able to support them with the results he observed in his own company. People were able to find solutions to their concerns faster when they could discuss their concerns rather than send vague e-mails back and forth and no longer needed to sift through lists of e-mails in hopes of finding the important ones. I think this is a prime example of where taking a step back from technology, even temporarily, helps increase productivity and reminds employees of the most efficient way to make use of it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/10/25/i-banned-all-internal-e-mails-at-my-company-for-a-week/