Month: January 2010

resonating within my mind. Firstly Zara’s culture is described as one of “immediacy”. How often are important corporate decisions debated to exhaustion prior to any decisions being made? On a more individual level how often do I avoid making difficult decisions—choosing instead to deal with simple aspects of a task first? By centralizing design activities at the central office the common excuses of being unable to find the appropriate coworker, or adequate resources, are rendered invalid.

This quotation segues nicely into the second: “Zara’s process allows designers the chance to fail quickly and relatively cheaply”. This cultural leniency further promotes the original point of immediacy. I will be less likely to put off a decision if I do not fear the repercussions of a mistake. This will allow creativity and quick decision making to occur with out the ever-present question of ‘if this goes wrong, will I get blamed’? By seeing success and failure of individual items as functions of the equation rather than final results the corporate culture is able to complement the supply chain in allowing decisions to be made with the same rapidity that distinguishes their production process.

Ray Lamontagne: Lesson Learned

Musical Inspiration for this post.

We were somewhat vaguely asked to write an entry having to do with business ethics—I have decided to shed light on the ethics of and element of business school: more precisely the indoctrination effect leading to a reduction in charitable donations by non-economics majors having attended intro and mid-level economics courses. Yoram Bauman, an economics professor at the University of Washington, in his study, tracked voluntary charitable donations by undergraduate students and compared results over time and across faculties. His hypothesis was that economics students would contribute less than other arts and sciences faculty members. What was yet to be determined was if this was due to a selection or indoctrination effect?

His conclusion was that economics majors were not affected over time; however, students with other majors sharply reduced donations if they studied intro-level economics. As he states, “Profit-maximization is a fine assumption for businesses, but a narrowly defined ‘selfish’ version of utility maximization and is neither accurate nor appropriate for modeling individual behavior.” Furthermore with numerous studies indicating that those displaying selfless behaviour are likely to progress further in their careers, and are generally happier, one must ask if economics education for non-economics majors makes individuals, and society, worse off.

Jason Molina: It Costs You Nothing

Musical inspiration for this post:

“The truth don’t hurt,
the truth don’t work,
it costs you nothing,
that’s what it was worth.”