Monday, July 30, 2007

just found at my friend's weblog



Source: www.oper.ru

The poster is one that every entrepreneur must have before thinking out his product. While listening in-class presentations I've caught slight feeling of understanding why most of the businesses are dead within 1st year. Every entrepreneur is sure that his\her project is unique and is by default successful.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Global warning.

Just came back from Friedrichshafen from Outdoor Trade Fair. I have a lot of notes, but need to work through them.

One the almost fiinished is about climate change impact. During our classes we discussed the possible incentives to businesses to pay attention to the problem of global warming. I've just had a talk to russian distributor and outdoor product developper, he told me that due to poor winter almost all russian retailers have now a huge amount on inventory. This can be translated to inventory holding costs, assortment obsolescence and therefore lowering margins for next year etc. So, to avoid those costs retailers should think in advance and invest into environmental projects.

Thinking further. Next year wholesaler will be suffering. Since retailers have huge stocks, they are going to lower their orders. The wholesalers' orders to suppliers also will lower. Moreover, due to poor sales (this year ducring Xmas the temperature was +7, snow covered the ground only in february, the season was closed in the end of march - no sales at all) retailers won't be able to pay in time. Therefore we have two more suffering parties.

The question now is if it is a global weather ternd or just a cyclical changes. Due to suffering now businesses are not willing to invest in environment. Moreover, this is classical prisoners' dilemma - if you confess and start investing while others stay silent, you're a loser. First mover disadvantage. And dilemma will be solved to unefficient no-no square until its players' asses will be fried.

That's why some institutions and organizations have recently appeared. One of them - European Outdoor Froup - started Association for Conversation. They're making environmental projects and collect money to do them. Members we selling goods during exhibition to invest. i will elaborate on this topic further.

5 strange facts about myself.

1. I love to drink kefir (russian sour milk) with salt and tomato juice. This is reminds me the taste of liquid when you finished tomato salad with yogurt or sour cream dressing.
2. I collect passanger coupons from all my flights (when they give a boarding pass and leave small right piece to me). By now I have 52.
3. I don't like reading books from the screen. Sometimes I print the text (two pages per sheet, double-sided). While reading I tear off page by page. And in the end of period of reading (I read in metro or train) I tear the read pages into 4 pieces. I have this habit since my job where I used a scratch paper to print articles. the information on the other side might be not for other people's eyes.
4. Being stressed for studies and work for a quite a long time I learnt self-fear management. Now I remain relaxed even in stress, but the only reminescence of it is stomack problem - I always have it when I supposed to be nervous.
5. I remember most of my sports accidents and like joking about them - that helps to avoid negative flashbacks.

Monday, July 16, 2007

more quotations from different classes

No classification. Just a list.
  • Negotiation class: Education is complicating your life to make one of the others better.
  • Ianna Contardo, Strategy: Drop your tools! (the resume of "Collapse of sensemaking in organizations: Mann Gulch case").
  • Jacob Hornik: "Competition is running faster than competitor."
  • Free markets online case (IS class?): ...without people who can sell a concept, ask for money and close deals, you are dead.
  • InfoSystems (guest speaker): News evolutioned to entertainment. Funny or horror, it is now no more than a way to amuse people. We're going to have news we'd like to hear. (Look at your friend-feed or remember last time you decided to maintain frendocite - F). It's scaring - to have only news you like. And boring most of times.
  • Cost accounting brain-washing (again, thanx for sharp eye of Mauricio): Normal costing is a costing system that traces direct costs to a cost object by using the actual quantities of direct-cost inputs and that allocates indirect costs based on budgeted indirect-costs rates times the actual quantities of the cost-allocation bases.
  • Org.behavior (Pino Bethencour): Leadership is a hard work. The price leader often pays is lonlyness.
  • Own note after 1st term: Perfectionism hurts.
  • All classes: tree main concepts: added value, CSR (in all aspects) and 'It depends' (as an answer to any questions).
  • OB: Gentelmen, that's a sad thing to mean nothing. Old Man, 12 angry men.
  • Marketing (first awful professor on this subject): Sales are the people implementing marketing hopes and dreams into reality. That's how it should be.

from other blog notes

I've got the perfect marketing professor finally. My russian professors were at most regular (except one pricing guy who was tough, but ok). And here I was disappointed, even started hating the subject.

http://www.billcarney.org/

This guy changed a lot. I've got a bunch of quotations from his classes. Here they are.
  • In our knowledge we have perception "the more the better". It depends upon whom this more belongs and how much they're paying for that.
  • You make money on similarities, but differences cost you money.
  • Approach to non-mutinational company - do product, do marketing idea and push everything to distributors - they should be interested in product distributio. Put marketing effort - promotion, sampling etc to them - you don't have time for that.Distributors know their markets. If you are ok to tell them what to do, you don't need them. Just go to the market and do it yourself.
  • Marketing strategy is a carefully designed plan of actions which aim is to elicit specific response of a specific target group of customers. Official, but according to the scheme Who-What-How.
  • Pricing is the marketing mix element by which you meet your financial obectives. Wrong price - unsatisfied consumer - lost profit - failed financial goal.
  • All your efforts should be done to customers who are sesitive to your core business values. First focus on the customers that is easier to obtain.
  • Salestaff compensation normally consists of 3 parts: base salary, comission, bonus. What the mix? Depends upon your target. Sales compensation is now used for manipulating. Base salary is a primary control - discipline, business practices etc. Comission which is a percentage from sales is a working icentive, the more you sell the more u get. And finally bonus is an appreciation of teamwork and collaboration. You as a manager define the mix since you know your staff better.

let's get it started

After another thoughtful weekend of packing my stuff, thinking out my future, watching several episodes of Sex and the City and having two big tomato salads with cheese and Greek yogurt and wild berries’ ice-cream (3% fat only!) I suddenly become inspired to start writing marketing plan report for one of asignaturas in my Spanish MBA.

Several hours of squeezing my way through papers Mauricio printed out for me (this guy has his brains tuned perfectly for music industry!), I’ve got the first impression of this report to be. The bees-thoughts found their way to bee-hive.

The report is about analyzing current situation for record labels faced the challenge from digital music distribution – all the talks about DRM (digital rights management), Steve Jobs and iPods. Reading through Sean Carton’s “will the Digital Music Industry Survive” I again got the mental itching for professional weblogs. From September great time starts for me – 4 months of electives in iMBA. Good food for brains.

To have a right mood for making report on music industry challenge, I decided to play one of the playlists Mauricio gave me. Since all my stuff is packed and moved to my friend’s apartment, the only available was in my computer’s music directory. Ironically, the one I wanted to listen – Cicada – was protected with DRM and I didn’t get the legal copy yet. So, now I’m with Hot Chips and their album “The Warning” (ripped from CD, by the way) thinking out the industry’s situation.

The only negative consequence of the making report (not counting spending my time and decision on making another weblog) is that now I terribly want iPod. Networking externalities are working. And I’m not involved in the network. Yet.