Category: MBA

Hooray for bullshit

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Two good bits of news from Spacing today: the City of Toronto finally plans to go ahead with the Bloor Street revitalization they’ve been talking about for years (while we’ll have moved downtown by the time it’s completed, I still work up here), and they’re also (finally) going ahead with the Union Station overhaul. Hopefully this means no more being crushed when you take the escalator down to the platform at rush hour. Actually, being 6’2″ / 220 I’m less concerned with being crushed than I am with crushing some tiny Korean lady.

Regarding the Bloor Street sidewalk work, I echo what Torontoist is saying: hopefully the lack of a bike lane is just an oversight. Take Make The Tooker.

.:.

And now, two bits of news from the Toronto Star: the (c)Raptors lucked out and won the #1 pick in the NBA draft lottery last night (though there’s no clear #1 this year), and Alexa Ray Joel lucked out and got her mother’s looks. Actually, on second look, she does kind of look like her father…but I guess there’s enough Christie Brinkley in there to make it work. Thank god. Not a big fan of the music, but at least it doesn’t sound like the usual American Idol excretions.

.:.

I’d love to see the Freakonomics guys take a run at bullshit claims like this:

“Smokers’ rights advocates say 1,000 businesses will go bankrupt and thousands of people will lose their jobs as a result of Ontario’s new anti-smoking legislation, set to take effect in a week. ‘At least 4,000 businesses will be impacted,’ Edgar Mitchell, of the Pub and Bar Coalition of Canada, said at a news conference in Toronto Wednesday. ‘Possibly 2,000 will have severe difficulties and as many as 1,000 will be forced out of business. Yes, some pubs and bars can adapt, but it’s a damned hard road.'” [via CTV]

Setting aside for a second that — on the very day that Heather Crowe died of lung cancer from the second-hand smoke she inhaled working in a bar — this asshat wants us to put the business interests of 1,000 bars (a venture with a high failure rate under any circumstances) ahead of the health of the tens of thousands of citizens who’d pass through them…where the hell did he get that nice, round number? What’s he basing the figures on? What research shows this? Has he found another market that underwent these changes and matches Ontario’s? Has he extrapolated it from the earlier municipal bans and restrictions imposed in Ontario? And if so, I’d love to see his numbers; there’ve been considerable research findings to the contrary.

Paging Steven Levitt…

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I find this little doodad fascinating, addictive and frustrating all at once. Blame boing boing.

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I got a 90% on my marketing assignment. I was convinced that an entire paper of bullshit didn’t merit anything better than a C-, but I guess this mark makes sense. Talking out of one’s ass never get anyone fired from a marketing job.

.:.

I worked through some of my music “inbox” today, checking off the new Concretes (yech…except for “You Can’t Hurry Love”), the new Magneta Lane (killer, as expected) and the new Final Fantasy (only two good songs: “This Lamb Sells Condos”, which is a Toronto in-joke, and “Many Lives -> 49mp”, which he played last year the Arcade Fire concert and freaked us all out, what with the shouting into the violin and all). I started into the new Pilate disc, which seems ok, if a little bland.

[tags]bloor street, union station, tooker, raptors, alexa ray joel, american idol, freakonomics, ontario smoking ban, marketing, concretes, magneta lane, final fantasy, pilate[/tags]

The ICB is not filling me with confidence right now

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

As you might be able to tell from past blog postings, I’m in an MBA program that’s done jointly by Dalhousie University and the Institute of Canadian Bankers. I’m almost halfway through the program right now, so I found it odd this morning when I received an email from the ICB telling me that, because I have some credits with them, I could apply for this exciting joint MBA they offer with Dalhousie.

Now, granted, screwups happen like this sometimes. Email marketing’s an inexact science; trust me, I know that from past experience. This, to me, seems like kind of a rookie mistake…like the marketing people just didn’t think to check their mailing list against the list of people who’re actually taking the MBA program they’re trying to pitch. What bothers me is this: the MBA course I’m taking right now is the ICB marketing course.

I find myself questioning their expertise.

.:.

I’m excited that my oldest brother might be flying over to spend some time with us here in Toronto this summer. He’ll be back in Nova Scotia this summer, but between the Montreal and New York trips earlier in the year, the Rockies trip in the fall and the aggressive saving for the condo closing date in April it was just too much of a squeeze for us to make that trip as well. But ifhe shows up here in TO, I’m sure we can get into some trouble.

[tags]mba, dalhousie, icb, marketing, family[/tags]

mesh: day 2.0

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

The mesh conference wrapped up a couple of hours ago. Final thoughts:

Day 2 wasn’t quite as good as day 1, if you ask me. There was more of a marketing focus today (there was a venture capital/PR stream as well, but I ignored that), and it felt like the potential of the conference got a bit lost in the noise of the “blogs are an extension of marketing” vs. “blogs are the end of marketing” debate; yesterday, the “old” media vs. “new” media debate seemed more reasoned and friendly, but today the marketing/PR people seemed to be dug into a trench. Or maybe that was just how I heard it. Anyway…

The first two keynote speakers — Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky — were both great, especially Kedrosky. He’s very funny, and has some great stories about who’s getting funding and why.

By the way, lots of people were liveblogging the keynote sessions, in case you want the summary versions of what was said. Technorati should point you in the right direction.

Of the “15 minutes of fame” spots, my favourite was Favorville.com…even though the poor guy talking to us about it was interrupted by a shrill and persistent fire alarm. It drives me nuts when the security desk comes on every few minutes to tell you…exactly what they told you a few minutes ago. Or to give you useless information like “The fire alarm was triggered on the fourth floor of the south building…that’s the fourth floor of the south building…not the concourse level.” Uh, that’s great; can you clarify for me whether or not there are deadly flames? That I’d like to know. Sheezus.

Tara Hunt was next. Maybe I was expecting the wrong things from her keynote, but I wasn’t wowed. Strange, ’cause if you hear her talk for five minutes, you’d kind of expect to be wowed when she has a whole hour to herself. She’s obviously smart, and I could just tell from her comments and reactions in the afternoon panel (which I’ll get to in a minute) that our brains were in the same place on the topics at hand…but I just didn’t feel like I knew anything new after her hour was up.

After lunch I had three session. The first and third were very focused on marketing, brand, PR…all stuff that I think is the devil, so it was interesting watching the two camps — the old guard who suspect something’s up and keep saying “blog-o-sphere” hoping that they’ll fit in, and the idealists who want to lead a revolution to kill marketing and PR as we know it but keep getting shouted down in their company’s meetings — face off politely. The best point of the day, I thought, went to Jonathan Ehrlich from Chapters.Indigo, who simply stated that you can have the best marketing in the world, but unless you have a kickass product behind it,the marketing’s pointless. To me, this seems like common sense, but some people actually debated him about it. Specifically, they claimed that it was marketing that made the iPod great; Ehrlich’s point was that the product was good first; then came the top-notch marketing. Good product + great marketing = #1; great product + shite marketing = Creative Labs. Their players have more functions, longer battery lives and better prices. Ever heard of ’em? Exactly.

The second session of the afternoon was about corporate blogging. Tara Hunt was back for this one; they also brought up Jeremy Wright and Debbie Weil, whose comments were as vapid as her site is godawful. You know when someone gets about 50% of what’s going on (I mean in the grand scheme of things, not just what went on in the session), but thinks they’re an expert, and talks to everyone else — most of whom fully get it — as if they’re the expert? Everyone in the room just rolls their eyes and laughs a little bit? That’s kinda what this was like. In spite of this, I did manage to catch a few useful tips from Jeremy and the audience about how to sell executives on corporate blogging, so maybe I can take another run at mine.

.:.

The conference was a pretty good time, and tomorrow I’ll be pushing some of what filtered into my head out into my work blog(s), but I’ll be curious to see what’s on the agenda for next year. Will there be two days’ worth of new topics 363 days from now? Hard to say. Did I get anything out of it this year? Honestly, I think it may have been worth the money just to get the kind of kick in the ass that the 5-minute speech from Elissa Gjertson of Are You Frank? gave yesterday.

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I arrived home today to find my “Bomb The Blogosphere” t-shirt in the mail, one day after I really needed it. Oh fate, why must you tempt me with tardy vestments?

[tags]mesh06, mesho conference[/tags]

The decadence continues

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

This morning CBGB called and asked us if we wanted to go for brunch. After some minor waffling because we had brunch yesterday, and because I’ve got lots to do today, we happily caved and met them on the Danforth. We went to the Old Nick, a pub well known for their brunch. I was pretty impressed, actually; I had the “Well Hung” breakfast, consisting of scrambled eggs, chicken sausage (with bits of pineapple and red pepper), home fries, greens and toast & jam…all of it organic. GB got pretty much the same thing, and CB got some french toast that looked pretty damn tasty (also organic through and through). Nellie went old school and got the non-organic bacon & eggs, and couldn’t get her eggs done properly (she never can; does anyone know how to ask for eggs fried over very, very hard, with nothing even remotely resembling liquid left inside?) but she seemed to enjoy it overall.

There was a ton of food on my plate, but I didn’t feel stuffed or greasy after eating it. I think we’ll be going back; now that we’re going over there more to see CBGB, it’s slowly sinking in that the west end of the Danforth really isn’t very far away. I blame the Don Valley for being a mental barrier.

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The Senators, once again, have bowed out of the playoffs much sooner than expected. To me, their chances of winning the cup faded badly around the same time as my chances of winning my hockey pool: when Dominik Hasek was injured early in the Olympic tournament. As Bob McKenzie says, the team will likely be dismantled to some degree.

I gotta say, if you’d told me that Ottawa would be knocked out by Buffalo and Carolina would have New Jersey on the ropes, while Anaheim was moving on in the west and waiting for the winner of Edmonton & San Jose (which looks to be the only real scrap in round 2, unless Jersey can win today), I’d have called you a crazy man. Or woman. Or what have you.

.:.

Sigh…have to start reading marketing again.

[tags]brunch, old nick, organic, danforth, ottawa senators, nhl playoffs, marketing[/tags]

Je deteste le marketing

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I finished my first (and last) marketing assignment this week. Here’s what I told a friend about it:

“I believe that, were I to print mine, an Indian somewhere would shed a single tear. Moreover, every employee on Madison Avenue would feel a cold chill down their spine, and the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto would all get nosebleeds. I, myself, shall know the very meaning (or translation, as it were) of schadenfreude if I get anything above a C-.”

I’m not the only one who said this. Everyone I’ve talked to in the class thought the assignment was ridiculous, and as far as I can tell everyone just shat out 3 pages of gobbledegook and hit the ‘submit’ button.

Hooray for higher education.

[tags]mba, marketing[/tags]

Adam & Eva

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We just got back from watching The Sentinel (imdb | rotten tomatoes), to which we’d won free tickets from Now. It was…not so good. Basically there was nothing in the movie that you couldn’t see coming six miles away, and Eva Longoria was completely, absolutely, 100% useless. I think she just wandered by the set one day and they grabbed her, put her in a secret-service-y-looking suit and gave her a couple of lines. I’d skip this one unless you’re having a stupid day and want something predictable. Or unless someone gives you free tickets.

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Oh god no: Kerry ‘thinking hard’ about 2008 run for president.

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I finally got my economics mark back today, which means that course is officially over with. I’m well into the book for my next course — marketing — and it’s oh-so-thrilling. It’s also a bit hard to plough through, since I regard marketing as just below cheese-in-a-tube on the scale of human accomplishment. I’m trying to read this textbook at the same time as Cluetrain, which is kind of like reading Wealth Of Nations and The Communist Manifesto at the same time.

86.6%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

The playlist I’ve set up for the cab ride home tomorrow*:

  • Arcade Fire . “Neighbourhood #1”
  • The Fiery Furnaces . “We Got Back The Plague”
  • Morningwood . “The nth Degree”
  • The New Pornographers . “Letter From An Occupant”
  • Troubled Hubble . “What We Do”

* Yes, I’m just this bored.

86.3%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

For the second meal in a row, we couldn’t bear the thought of the cafeteria food (our choices were veal, lamb, fish and leek soup) so eight of us ordered pizza and just finished scarfing it down. They even brought us some free pop so I snagged a dp on my way out. Score. I’m just settling in to do some more pseudo-studying and listen to the Canadiens game on streaming radio.

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The Modern Mod (or WineBoffin, as he’s sometimes known) points out Slingbox’s announcement that they’ll bring their product to Canada. Sweet.