Read My visit to Rotman School of Management Part 1 or Visit to Rotman Part 2 - Walid on MBA ROI first if you want.

For the second session I went to Negotiating for Success by Glenn Whyte.

He welcomed us to the class and said is was good to see a class. “Who better than me? I’ve been teaching for 20 years,” he said.

He began talking about negotiation.

“Just because you are highly experienced doesn’t mean you are good at something. “There is not a tight link between experience and expertise, I give you my golf game.”

Part of getting better at something is timely feedback. “How do you know your negotiations are effective?” he asked.
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In a place where asphalt is so evident and it seems like so much of the space has been ruined by human indifference, it is nice to see signs of nature, even if it is a bird eating a bird, yikes.

I saw this hawk eating a duck while I was walking down University Avenue West. It is in the flood plain between the avenue and Laurel Creek (which used to be called Beaver Creek).

So, the attorney general announced that he would pursue legislation against overpriced tickets from Ticketmaster.

Chris Bentley told CBC News that Ticketmaster has offered some assurances to prevent the resale of tickets on TicketsNow, but company executives weren’t prepared to go far enough to meet his demands.

“We’ll be drafting legislation to deal with these issues concerning access and pricing when tickets are issued and then turn up on the resale market,” he said Monday.
— Ontario attorney general to bring in legislation on ticket overpricing cbc.ca 24 Mar 2009

People will rightly point out that scalpers are getting away with scalping already, but the company that actually has some connection to the event can’t regain some of the consumer surplus. I don’t particularly care for Ticketmaster, but why can’t they allow named tickets, flat rate tickets by lottery, and auction for guaranteed tickets, like I suggested before.

• On pricing and the Ticketmaster investigation 5 Mar 2009

Eric Higgs gave a knowledge integration talk on Friday, which i attended before work.

Ray Crossman introduced him listing some of the things that make Eric unusual. Eric took integrated studies at Waterloo and later did a joint philosophy planning degree. He also served as Federation of Students president.

Eric said he was grateful to his philosophy supervisor for allowing him to include maps in his dissertation. I’m sure the planning prof had no problem with it.

The Arts lecture hall was packed with mostly young students. Some, I gather, were in Waterloo’s Knowledge Integration program and others were part of the spring break Waterloo Unlimited enrichment program. Most of them were listened intently and taking notes, but a few, about half a dozen were dozing off. It probably showed they were nearing the end of a hectic week.

Eric first talked about a time span photo comparison project he is working on called The Mountain Legacy Project. For the project he and his team photograph the same scene as photos from a hundred years ago and compare them to see physical changes in the environment. “It’s a wonderful way to see process and phenomena,” he said.
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I am reading an apparently activist book on Canada’s banking system. It was published in 1997 so it is a little old, but still interesting. The author seems cynical, ready to see conspiracy and criticize everything, but I expect I will learn some good points from it.

Early on I was interested by this passage that suggests it is not just the government who runs a money importing business for eastern Canada.

The great virtue of a banking system that consisted of a few large companies, each with many branches across the country, was supposed to be that the funds would be transferred readily from areas of surplus to the regions where they were needed for devleopment. It did not work out that way. In one Maritime town, by 1912, the ratio of deposits to loans was running at twenty to one [...] the surplus being transferred to central Canada. When the Maritimers complained, the head of the Bank of Montreal dismissed their grousings as “local grievances against what we regard as the interests of the country as a whole.”
In the West, too, complaints about the sacking of local funds to build up central Canada were dismissed with scorn. [...] Grain farmers were faced with a banking system designed to force them to dump their crops onto the market for whatever it would bear. When they went to borrow money, the notes were dated to come due just before harvest-time. [...] Requests loan extensions to await a price rise were rudely and routinely rejected. In addition, loans for farm machinery and other improvements were rare; what the banks wanted was to finance crops in such a way that, when they came to be sold, prices would be low in the Eastern markets. To get around this, the Westerners tried to found their own institutions, but the Canadian Bankers Association exercised its right to veto new charters to kill a Western bank.
— Bank Heist | How our financial giants are costing you money Walter Stewart

• Ontario gets more federal money through contracts 4 Nov 2008

I was interested in reading about VanCity, which is the largest credit union in Canada. I found the book on the library catalogue, but it was in offsite storage, so I had to request it. I picked it up at Dana Porter this afternoon.

I just started reading it while I waited for the Higgs talk. The book opens with a great story from 1946 right there in Chapter 1.

Sometime during the day, a Mr. C.P. Crad walked in the door. He had three $100 bills in his hand, representing his fortune. He was looking for a credit union.He had just arrived from Saskatchewan and knew about such things. He wasn’t an employee of a company or a member of a labour union or church that already had a credit union. thew only one he was eligible to join, Makovichuk told him, was something called Vancouver City Savings, which was open to any resident in Vancouver. It was just starting. The charter hadn’t even come back from Victoria yet.
“Where do i deposit my money?” Crad asked.
Makovichuk had no idea. She had never seen $100 bills before; most people hadn’t. In fact she had never seen $50 bills, despite being in her early thirties. Jack Burns was in the office in the middle of a split shift [...] ” There’s a man in the other room with three $100 bills,” she explained, “and he wants to join the new credit union.”
“Take his money,” Burns barked.
“But I am not a member,” Makovichuk protested. “I can’t do that.”
“Well,” Burns replied, “sign ourself up and then sign him up.”
So she did, throwing in 50 cents for membership dues and $1 for a fifth of a share. Martha Makovichuk, a secretary, a woman of Ukrainian extraction, of no standing at all in the young but already proud British Columbia credit union movement, became book member number 1.
— Working Dollars | The VanCity Story, Herschel Hardin

I just noticed this again today.

There is something weird about the keypad on the microwave in our kitchen.

Did you see it?

The numbers are all bold except for the 4 and the 5.

How does that happen?

It is a Sylvania brand microwave. I don’t know the model. Let me know if you have an idea.

The Vancouver Whitecaps have scheduled a news conference for today, where they are expected to announce that the soccer team will be leaving the USL for Major League Soccer.

The Globe and Mail has a story about how amid the economic slowdown MLS is unique among professional leagues for expanding. The league certainly learned its lessons from the failure of the NASL and I hope they make it.

If it happens, I’ll be glad for the Whitecaps to join the top tier. When I was young my aunt and uncle gave me some Whitecaps paraphernelia when the team competed in the erstwhile North American league.

With an announcement expected today confirming an expansion franchise for Vancouver to begin play in 2011 (perhaps to be joined by Portland, though there are a few snags to be worked out there), the MLS is the only North American professional league that is growing in the face of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
[...]
And the truth is, the MLS didn’t require mass conversions to survive. Its growth strategy (unlike, say, the NHL’s) is based on a tight, realistic player salary structure, and in taking the game to people who already like it, who understand it, who have become literate in the sport through television exposure to European leagues and World Cups.
— This sports league has the business figured out TGAM 18 Mar 2009

Here’s a new low in xenophobic American protectionism. A U.S. border agent blocked entry to a salesman who markets American products to Canadian stores for supposedly “stealing American jobs.”

Borsteinas said the border officer who refused to allow him entry to the U.S. was the supervisor on duty at the time, at the Sumas crossing in southwestern B.C.

“I said, ‘Well I don’t actually bring the products in. I just write the orders. It’s all in Canada,’ ” said Borsteinas.

“He says, ‘Oh you are a consultant then.’ I says, ‘No — I’m just a salesman. I sell to Canadian stores.’ And he says ‘Nope, you are a consultant,’” said Borsteinas. “Once again, he says ‘You are stealing jobs away from us.’”
[...]
Schreiber also said border officers aren’t supposed to accuse anyone of trying to steal American jobs.
– Canadian accused at U.S. border of ’stealing American jobs’ 16 Mar 2009

Read My visit to Rotman School of Management Part 1 first if you want. Or you can go on to read Part 3.

The Return on Your MBA Investment, Walid Hejazi

The first session I went to was about the ROI of an MBA.

Walid was a good talker. He lectured smoothly had good movement around the small classroom and posed several questions to the group.

He said that when choosing a business school you look where people are going “where the queues are.” Schools will tell you their rankings or their ratings which are “all about the averages.”

He said he would tell us strategies to maximize our return.

What factors predict success for undergrads? he asked.

People called out answers and got most on the slide he would reveal: Work ethic, networks, GPA, interpersonal skills, work experience, height and good looks.

He told us that managers need to know statistics. He said confidence correlates to height (which didn’t fully answer the question). “The last thin you want to do is make a decision based on the misperception of the data.”

He described some situations and asked us to interpret them.
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