Gregor Allan's Blog

The United Nations, with full funding from it’s various participating nations, would be woefully inept when it comes to answering for the needs of business-minded individuals in small, impoverished nations.

Theoretically, a fully funded UN could supply security, emergency food and water rations to every man, woman and child, and yet would be unable to give these men, women and children the skill set and abilities to give back to their community.

So we see a large gap between people in impoverished countries, who have the will to succeed, and yet lack the knowledge tool kit to do so, that would end up essentially wasting the valuable charity given money.

Now, even if a fully funded United Nations could give enough capital to every individual government so that each nation could fund it’s own socially minded programs fully, there would still be inefficiency and waste. Governments and the United Nations set forth lofty goals that, though well intentioned, are far too generalized to really be effective on a “boots on the ground” grassroots level. Also, government welfare and such systems take far to much time to reach everyone in need of their respective services and are hence behind the game.

The Arc Initiative, and social entrepreneurial missions similar to the Arc, attack a problem at the grassroots level by sending in experienced individuals willing to share their knowledge with entrepreneurs in developing countries, essentially giving them the tools they need to succeed with the charity given by the United Nations and their respective government agencies.

I’m all for lofty goals and lovely speeches, but I think that it would faster and more efficient to keep the talking to a minimum and use all that extra time helping at a hands-on level.

The music scene today strikes me as a market where every single competitor’s strategy is differentiation. Monarch Studio’s founder and Sauder alumnus Tom Dobrzanski said as much during the Question and Answer period with him the other day.

Each band employs Porter’s differentiation approach to their sound. Bands employ a fade here, a drop there. Genres, like rock and roll, or smooth jazz, are born out of the need to differentiate. But the greatest differentiator that I have heard in the music industry is the voice, the sound, of a band or artist. Frank Sinatra, booming over the roar of the crowd or Freddie Mercury’s falsetto soaring through the scales, it’s what makes a band stand out.

Yet today, that is too easily achieved. Don’t get me wrong: the same proportion of artists have this incredible gift, yet so many others employ producers who, armed with programs like Autotune, bend and stretch the abilities of an admittedly average voice into something extraordinary.

In the pursuit of differentiation, and hence success, and the creation of a new sound, artists become nothing more than acts, singing into a magic microphone.

Artists are speaking out now, calling for a halt to the imitation game that pop has become, and I feel like it is only a matter of time before bands that cannot perform live simply won’t be able to tour and hence earn massive profits.

In the music industry of the future, the ethical choice to be honest about your voice your sound and your group’s abilities will be worth far more financially than a creative producer.

I hope producers like Tom feel the same.

http://www.hometracked.com/2008/02/05/auto-tune-abuse-in-pop-music-10-examples/

Performance determines success and success entails a reward, which in turn motivates performance. That much is true in the business world, and in class we have seen examples of how the right rewards can light a fire in any employee.

Here at UBC, however, the board in charge of distributing athletic funding is doing it wrong. Their supposed “tiered” system of Elite Varsity teams that are poised for excellence, Varsity and then lower down, Club funding levels make sense in theory; reward the teams that will and do win with cash to help them keep doing what they do best. Except their system for determining the teams that are “Elite” is broken and hence the system of motivation does not work.

A perfect example of the aforementioned flaws is the funding difference between the UBC Men’s Rowing Team and the UBC Men’s Football Team.

This year, the football team lost their first three games, including the Homecoming game by an embarrassing margin. The UBC rowing crew has won every fall regatta (race) this year, including Western Canadian University Rowing Championships and Canadian University Rowing Championships, bringing back the Men’s Points Banner to UBC.

Yet the football team is classified as “most likely to succeed” whilst the rowing crew, the fastest in a country that wins internationally, is lower on the funding list. It begs the question:

Does this drive success in either sport?

Adding to the 2013 blog post http://blogs.theprovince.com/2014/01/21/ubc-brass-announces-16-survivors-leaves-13-other-varsity-programs-awaiting-future-fate/#__federated=1

UBC is home to close to 50,000 students who are here to learn, live and have the time of their lives. The experience for most UBC students, Canadian-born or international, is nothing short of excellent as this university provides one of the most sought after post-secondary educations in North America.

To maintain the teaching quality, infrastructure, food, residence, and resources available to students here, UBC needs substantial sums of money. Its greatest tool to increase revenue is to increase tuition.

This hot topic is on the forefront of everyone’s minds here on campus.

I don’t see why everyone is complaining.

Yes, granted, UBC is about equality, and the 10% tuition raise for international students now tips the scales so that national and international students are, all Canadian taxes included, no longer paying equal amounts, with international students shouldering extra costs, but they are in no position to complain. Brown University, the Ivy-League, ranked lower globally for quality of education costs around 62,000 dollars per year. At UBC, even the most “outrageous” tuitions are not even two-thirds of that sum.

Here at UBC, we enjoy a world-class education, and there is simply no viable way to maintain the same standard in a difficult economy without raising funds.

So, if I may be so bold as to give advice to the students who find this tuition raise an outrage, I say this: If you don’t want to pay the tuition hike, don’t. All you’ll need to do is find another university of equal value to call your home.

Best of luck.

http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/financial-aid/cost-attendance

Without a doubt, the best business model I have ever seen in action and heard of capitalizes on uncertainty, has grassroots, ethical and even supernatural (I’m not kidding) marketing and is the most influential for profit on the face of the earth:

The Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Let me explain; the Catholic Church has been around for around two millennia and has never once dropped out of prominence in that vast span of time. From a moral perspective, the Church has done some very great and some very horrible work, but I’m not interested in examining it as a religious entity, I am talking about the Church as the definition of a successful for-profit enterprise, and the world’s most effective Ponzi scheme.

It uses an incredibly creative marketing strategy and hasn’t had to change its value proposition for millennia: give us your time and your money, and we will save your immortal soul.

Religiously, that’s fine and dandy, but as a business? It’s absolutely brilliant! Bring in investors who throw substantial sums of their hard earned wages at you as long as they live for a return that they will literally never see in this lifetime.

It’s a nigh unending Jordan-esque river of capital flowing straight into the vaults of the Vatican, and the best part is, no one can seem to give enough, as an immortal soul is never quite safe until, well, your time – or your coffer – has run out.

I believe if a corporation were able to imitate the Catholic Church and extract the same amount of capital from a similarly inelastic market, then they would be more than able to stand the test of time, too.

Building on Pathos’ blog

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/09/in-defense-of-nice-churches.html