Traditionally I have always viewed teamwork as a superior alternative to individual work. This is because I think minds that work collaboratively will always be more creative, effective, and efficient, compared to its individual counterpart. In week 5, we engaged in a survival activity to demonstrate the power of teamwork. This activity changed my view of teamwork.

The Activity

In class, we were given a list of items and placed a survival scenario. Our job was to rank the importance of each item. We were to do this twice: once as an individual and once collaboratively as a team. At the end of the activity, we would compare our answers to a survival experts, and see if our choices together were better as individuals or as a team.

The Results

My individual score from this exercise was significantly better than my team score. In fact, in this scenario, if I were to work in a team, I would for sure die. Don’t get me wrong, I love my team to death (intended pun) but sometimes, when you work in a team, you no longer stick with your original ideas and you can get easily mislead. In my case, I changed the items I prioritized originally in order to adapt and fit the views of the overall team.

This exercise showed me that although I love working in a team, sometimes teams can hinder your individual ability. Some members of my team had a higher survival chance in working as a team but for myself, I was better off making decisions alone. Another soft skill this lesson taught me was to voice my opinions louder. My team may have been better off had I been more firm on what I believed in but I hesitated as I was going against the majority vote. Teamwork is great in many ways, however, it is not always the best way to complete tasks.

We’ve all had our fair share of horrendous job experiences. After Week 4’s discussion on our worst job experience, I can now quantify and identify why my job was so horrible. My worst job has to be when I worked in a kitchen. (Out of respect for the establishment, the restaurant name or location will not be named.) If you don’t know, a kitchen job is a hot, high stress, and fast paced working environment. In many ways, you are a glorified robot, only completing 5-6 tasks a day.

My job on entrée varied shift by shift. If I was on broil, I would be in charge of cooking. This meant my entire shift would consist of cooking various proteins such as steaks, chicken, and fish. If I was on call, my shift consisted of my calling out orders to my broil cook and setting up plates for my finisher. If I was on finish, I would collect plates from my caller and plate the various foods. Although my workplace tried to improve my skill variety, I was doing very on a shift by shift basis. This system also hindered the task identify as well as task significance. Although I was in charge of making the product for the customer, there were chefs that will kick you off the station and take over if you couldn’t keep up. This made you feel insignificant overall. There was very high autonomy as you can expect to work 10-12 hours a shift because of poor scheduling. These reasons culminated in a terrible working experience at such restaurant.

The only reason why I stayed with my job was the fact that you were provided abundant amounts of feedback. This feedback was given live and after every shift. Supervisors are very unfiltered and will explicitly explain your performance that shift. As a result of this feedback, I was intrinsically motivated to always improve regardless of the poor working conditions.

Understanding what makes a job bad is important for me as a future employer because it allows me to set policies that both motivate and empower my employees, in order to have the best working conditions and most productivity imaginable.

Today in class we discussed what motivates different people and personalities. This discussion had a key takeaway: people are motivated by different factors, whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic.  After discussing these definitions, I got to thinking. Is everyone extrinsically motivated to some extent?  

During our discussions, we identified the difference between being motivated by fear versus being motivated by appraisal. While these examples clearly demonstrated two polar means of motivation, can we further generalize extrinsic and intrinsic motivators? In my head, extrinsic motivators are materialistic motivators as it requires someone else to praise you in order to feel the effects. Intrinsic motivators on the other hand are internal, and is fuelled on self determination to produce the best output. Referring back to my original question, are all people extrinsically motivated to some extent? I’ve come to the conclusion that unless someone has enough financial capital and assets to live the rest of their life without worry, we are all extrinsically motivated to some extent in order to make ends meet.

Upon my reflection, I used myself as an example as to why I have arrived to my conclusion. I think I am an intrinsically motivated worker. I work hard because I take pride in the outputs I produce. I generally will not take on tasks unless it is worthwhile for me to complete. My logic here is my marginal benefit of doing something must outweigh the marginal cost. The marginal cost of performing a task I don’t want is frustration and anger. An extrinsic motivator will offset the marginal cost and add some more benefit to make the task worthwhile to complete.

The only time I see extrinsic motivation failing is when there isn’t enough benefit being added on to make a task worthwhile to do. My argument illustrates how everyone can be extrinsically motivated to some extent.

I stumbled across Edwin Tsang’s blog and instead of reading about the latest business scandal, I read a cleverly titled post called Get out. Edwin devoted the entire blog post to speaking about something incredibly relevant to people like myself: how do I find my first grown up job?

At school and in lectures, we learn a lot about business concepts, like how to find the optimal price of a good in a perfectly competitive market, or how to calculate marginal profits using derivatives. What we don’t learn is how to differentiate yourself from the other hundreds of Sauder students, receiving the same B.Com degree.

In his blog, Edwin mentioned how he fast tracked his way into a start-up company, offsetting his lack of experience with wage grants.  Applying for government wage grants is such a clever way to landing your first internship/job. In class, we covered an entire section of risk management and how companies make decisions depending on the risk associated it with it whether it be investments, marketing strategies, or new hires. Having a government wage grant allows you to break the first barrier of entering a company: working for “free”. Although you aren’t working for free, the company can hire you at no risk because your wage gets paid through a third party. This means the only thing the company is investing is time to train and teach you.

Finding creative shortcuts is what I firmly believe will land you your next job position. Much like what Edwin said, doing well in school only makes up so much of your resume. Everyone graduating Sauder will have the exact same B.Com degree as you. It is how you present yourself to the employer and how you minimize the risk of the employer hiring you that will fast track your resume to the top of the pile.

After a fun 4 years of video looping, laughs, and video editing glory, Vine, the six second video app, is getting cut off by twitter. In the cleverly titled blog Why Vine Died, Casey Newton discussed points of differences vine had that users stopped appreciating. This fun blog brought up interesting aspects of vine that marketers capitalized in order to capture the attention of audiences.

Short and Sweet

Time is of the essence when it comes to capturing the consumer’s attention. With Vines six second time constraint, content creators were forced to jam pack the six seconds with as much visually pleasing content as possible. This concentrated content resulted in very high quality advertisements that targeted certain demographics depending on the creator.

Targeted Demographics 

Marketers are able to choose which content creator they want to collaborate with depending on the demographic of the creators following. We’ve seen this kind of targeted marketing with other social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. While this is not new, this form of marketing may be more effective than traditional poster, commercial, and radio advertisements.

Looping

Unlike traditional advertisements, Vine advertisements loop automatically once the vine is “finished”. A single viewer may unknowingly watch a single advertisement multiple times because of this vine exclusive feature. Viewers can get more engaged with vine advertisements as the vines do not stop until you physically click pause.

Popular Viners such as Logan Paul capitalized on their creativity and this opportunity and collaborated with companies such as Piano Tiles, Areopostale, and Verizon in order to make money using their six seconds of fame. According to a 60 minutes report, Logan Paul was paid $200,000 for a single vine, reaching more than seven thousand views and having the same impact as a primetime TV advertisement ad would have.

Although vine is not viewed as a typical advertisement platform, subtle branding across many vines like Logan’s vines can have the same reach as the traditional advertisement platforms. With twitter discontinuing vine as a social media platform, they are also discontinuing a channel of distribution for marketers, forcing marketers to seek and use other social media platforms suitable for adverts.

Google pixel recently released its new aggressively elegant marketing videos to pave its path into the smartphone world. Does high Camera resolution, a powerful processor, scratch resistant glass, lots of ram, and a big screen sound familiar? Advertisements of these points of parity only make up four seconds out of the 1:21 long video. What did google do and why are people talking about the Pixel? To understand more we need to jump to Janice Chok’s Blog.

In her blog, Janice breaks the explosive issues with the Samsung Galaxy Note S7 and how a company that once scorched the Mobile Device market, might be getting smothered out by competition. In her analysis, mentioned that “consumers are persuaded to be loyal to Samsung brand instead of competitors such as Apple and Google. With the official introduction of pixel, that may not be true anymore and here’s why.

Pixel Has Astonishing Points of Difference

The Google Pixel has impressive points of difference that may ignite the brand switching threat that Samsung may face. 7 hours of battery life in a 15-minute charging session? Unlimited photo storage 24/7 customer support with video connectivity? I’m not going to ask again, sign me up!

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Google ensured that Pixel would have an edge over the points of parity it shares with competitors. Ultra High Definition screens? Got it. Lots of megapixels in your camera? Upgraded it. 3.5 mm headphone jack? Kept it.

Google Inspires Action

Google as a company has defined their purpose to “organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible”. According the TedTalk, Google has established why they do what they do, resulting in a direct connection with the limbic of the consumer’s mind. The limbic brain is responsible for feelings and gut decisions. These feelings include trust and loyalty, which explains why this kind of marketing is more effective in producing sales, as the consumer knows the intentions of the company. Samsung on the other hand, is theoretically at a competitive disadvantage because they do not deliver the same marketing tactic. Their mission is to “make Samsung a digital leader”, which does not deliver the customer oriented product integrity google is approaching.

Because of these three points we can see why Pixel may be a huge threat to Samsung’s market share in the phone industry. Pixel can compete and in some cases, out competes Samsung in technology, and Pixel delivers their marketing in a more persuasive manner. With Samsung’s major recall of Note S7’s and the introduction to pixel, I would be concerned with Samsung’s market share in the phone market.

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Vancouver’s super-heated housing market was first faced with government intervention when it saw the introduction of the Foreign Buyers Tax back in June. This tax meant that overseas real-estate purchases would be slapped with an additional 15% tax, resulting in house prices costing hundreds of thousands more for overseas purchasers. The Vancouver real estate market is once again facing government intervention, this time addressing short term rent conflicts.

Unless one owns a hotel, motel, or bed and breakfast business licenses, one is not permitted to rent real estate to tenants for less than 30 days. The concern for short term renting arises when homeowners no longer rent to locals and resort to renting to tourists in order to maximize profits. “Housing is first and foremost about homes, not about operating a business” says Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. To take action, Mayor Gregor Robertson wants those renting sections of their homes on Airbnb to attain a business license, and to ban Airbnb listings for users that do not live in the home they post.

Airbnb is a beautiful concept. It allows those who live in homes to rent out rooms in their homes to tourists culminating in both consumer surplus and producer surplus.  Homeowners are able to fully utilize all their resources in order to make extra money and tourists are able to live more inexpensively. The issue with Airbnb arises when homeowners exploit Airbnb’s business model of home sharing and stop renting to locals, limiting the number of available homes for Vancouverites. I do see the major exploitation flaws of home sharing businesses. Unethical participants in the home sharing businesses use Airbnb as a source of untaxed income, while those looking for long term homes to rent suffer as renting to them would be less profitable then to rent to Airbnb.

There is a pattern for the problems that arise in item sharing businesses. Uber, cannot enter Canadian cities because of difficulties obtaining proper business licensing as there are scarce numbers of taxi licensing available. We can see this licensing issue stem to home sharing businesses, where renting homes for a short amount of time requires proper hotel or bed and breakfast business licenses. I guess one of the biggest lingering questions is what actions will Mayor Gregor Robertson take to intercept illegal home sharing businesses, and will his actions set legal precedence across Canadian cities to deal with illegal Airbnb postings.

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