by Brendon J. Wilson

Best Self Assessment

For one of my MBA courses (an organizational behaviour course on leadership) students were required to create a “best self” assessment based on input gathered from family, friends, and co-workers. The following is the best self assessment I submitted:

The description of positive traits provided by my friends, family, and former co-workers (see the summary in the Appendix) was not especially surprising. I have a pretty developed sense of my strengths and the “best self” portrait they described was well aligned with my own self-image. That isn’t to say that the descriptions didn’t reveal something unexpected. In particular, I found it interesting to see how much people noticed about me and remembered about my past projects. I personally don’t see much of interest in what I do – I just do it. It comes naturally. It seems like the right thing to do. I assume that I’m pretty much the same as everyone around me. However, the remarks offered suggest that people don’t see me as equivalent to everyone else; it’s something that I have encountered in the past, and it still shocks me.

There was one particular description that I did find quite unanticipated, namely that I display a non-judgmental nature. The respondent indicated that I don’t judge people on the basis of sex, colour, or race. While I agree that I don’t judge people on the basis of these characteristics, I don’t believe this is enough to indicate a non-judgmental nature. I feel that I can be quite critical of people’s abilities and output: I expect people to be able to perform at my level, and can be harsh when people fail to meet those expectations. I suppose this trait is an extension of my belief that I’m pretty much the same as everyone else. If I can do it, why can’t they?

The most useful part of this analysis was getting confirmation of what I consider to be my positive strengths. It’s one thing to think I possess a strength, but I always worry I could be deluding myself. If nothing more, this “best portrait” exercise allowed me to understand which areas I don’t need to focus on.

To guide my development for the future, I have set the following three goals on the basis of this “best portrait”:

  • Evolution not revolution: In the MBA program, I have often felt that my “shit-disturber” attitude was a liability – I’ve felt like a bit of an outsider with the other students because I don’t fall into line and accept things the way they are. Though I do believe I need to change this attitude, the “best self” portrait has highlighted that this quality is more of an asset than a liability, when used appropriately. But instead of completely changing myself, as I felt I might have to in order to succeed (both in the program, as well as in the business world), I should focus on how to incorporate this character trait in a more positive fashion. Less like Marlon Brando, more like “The Fonz”.
  • Recognize my own value: I’ve got a pretty big ego, but underneath it I don’t believe that I necessarily do anything that anyone else couldn’t do. I need to stop and look at the amount and type of work I do, compare my level of performance to those around me, and recognize the unique and valuable contribution that I do make to my groups and the class. Of course, it has to be done in moderation – last thing I need is to flip-flop and become a total egomaniac! I also need to understand that it’s not realistic to expect everyone to operate at the same level, and recognize people for the unique and valuable contribution they make, even if it’s not the contribution I would make.
  • Lighten up: Though my sense of humour was highlighted by respondents as an asset, responses indicated another set of common trait: overly serious. All of the comments talked about how I got things done, or got other people to get things done. Not a lot of fun there. Though it’s important to be productive, to do things right, to go out and get things done, I need to relax a little and not take things so seriously. No one lies on their deathbed wishing they’d spent more time at the office. This is my life, and it’s ending one second at a time – so, seriously, I need to go have some fun and let it slide when things aren’t exactly up to my standards.

In the future, I’d be quite interested in conducting a similar survey with the aim to create a “worst portrait” that would allow me to understand the areas on which I need to focus improvement. While it’s useful to have your best traits verified, I think being told about those aspects that aren’t necessarily positive would be useful to eliminate my “blind spots”. You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken!

Appendix

Work Ethic

Responses included specific references to my work ethic, in particular my ability to focus on a project and carry it through to completion with speed and attention to detail. Respondents indicated that I am strongly self-motivated and work best when given a project with few operational parameters, thus allowing me to develop my own agenda and approach to solving the given problem.

Interpersonal Skills

Comments from respondents highlighted my willingness to share information with others, explain things in detail when required, and not withhold information to promote a sense of power. Respondents also indicated that this enthusiasm extended to “schmoozing”, and using information to persuade, enthuse, and motivate others around me. Finally, respondents noted my desire to interact with people in a devil’s advocate role to “get to the root of the matter”.

Personal Characteristics

Responses indicated my irreverence for authority and ability to “rock the boat” in a good-humoured fashion enables me to think outside the box and pursue unconventional ideas relentlessly. “Big picture” thinking and strong problem solving skills were also specified as a strength that allows me to find new solutions to problems and handle unexpected circumstances without difficulty. A heightened sense of justice and a non-judgmental nature were also indicated as strong personal characteristics.

Common Examples Cited

Respondents cited a number of common examples to support their description of my best characteristics. Common examples cited include:

  • Suing the UBC MBA Program: In response to the levying of tuition fees by the university after my acceptance, I joined a group of students to sue for breach of contract. This example was used to illustrate my “rock the boat” nature, persuasive abilities, and sense of justice.
  • Writing a Book: I managed to convince New Riders to let me write my first book, “JXTA”, over five months of evenings and weekends while still working full-time. This example was used to illustrate my “get things done” attitude.
  • Taking on Sony: My wife’s Sony laptop broke and I discovered it was not only a common problem, but also that the company had known for a long time. I doggedly pursued the company for nine months, gathered a coalition of people with the same problem, and finally got the problem fixed for all us for free. This example was used to illustrate my irreverence for authority and sense of justice.
  • The MP Experiment: When I was unable to contact my MP via email, I conducted an experiment designed to determine the Internet-savvy of Members of Parliament by emailing every MP and posing as a constituent. Though the experiment earned me a visit from the National Security branch of the RCMP, it also brought the issue a fair amount of attention from the media, including Wired News, among others. This example was used to illustrate my irreverence for authority and strong self-motivation.
in Personal 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

The Smell of Books

I was walking around downtown near Vancouver’s spectacular public library building last week, when I overheard some brat ask what kind of person would waste such a neat building on a library. He’s lucky my hands were in my pocket, otherwise he’d have learned the answer was “Mr. Back-of-the-Hand, that’s who, you uncultured little snot!” Though my tongue was not also confined to my pockets, I somehow managed not to issue a retort. His dad looked big. I doubted I would be the victor in the “my dad can beat up a mouthy stranger” battle that would inevitably follow any supposedly witty remark I might have offered.

(sound of pants being hitched up to chest level)

“When I was a boy, kids had more respect for books!”

Actually that’s a lie. I had more respect for books. Other boys were occupied building crucial wrist muscles for puberty by playing with hockey cards. And the girls? Sadly, they were busily purging brain cells in a desperate attempt to ready themselves for the cut-throat junior high dating scene (“No one likes a know it all, dear.”)

For me, Sunday was the day. Oh sure, I had to go to church, but hey, that just gave me an hour of good “think time” – sort of like an hour on the toilet, if you will, except with more audience participation. But the reward came after, when we usually trundled down to the local library, respendent in its sickly-orange 60’s-vision of-the-future decor.

I knew the librarians by name. Could I have been any more of a geek?

I spent hours in that library. It started with a quick visit to see if there remained any Asterix or Tintin comic that I didn’t have memorized. Then a quick flip through the card catalog for any item that might be of interest – usually something in the “how to make your own X” genre. There was, of course, the requisite trip to the biology section to bone up on female anatomy (“be prepared”), followed by a quick prayer at the altar of the Church of Science Fiction (Reverend Arthur C. Clarke presiding). Finally, I’d stop at the magazines to find out if helicopter cars were a reality yet or if Popular Mechanics was going to continue jerking me around with that promise for another month.

The thing I remember most: the smell of library books.

I can’t identify the particulars of the smell of library books. It’s not just the smell of the paper they’re printed on, it’s more than that. It’s the smell of page-turn sweat, infused painstakingly in each page of a thriller novel, the spilled ingredients hastily swabbed off the pages of a recipe book, the oil embedded in the binding of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by the guy who threw the book across his garage when he realized it didn’t contains instructions on how to fix his Yamaha two-stroke engine. It’s the smell of people who care about learning something new.

I’m addicted to books. You may laugh but I actually must go into Chapters whenever I pass it. Must. It’s not quite the same as a library, but it’s close enough for a junky like me, acting like an ex-smoker sniffing the exhale from a drag on a passing Marlboro.

What worries me most is that people just don’t read enough these days and it shows. I’ve had to explain words to people in my MBA class (then again, who am I to talk about vocabulary use – I used the word “epidural” instead of “diuretic” in class the other day. Whoops.) A classmate asked me what I read to keep up to date and I had a hard time narrowing it down. I listed a bunch of books I’d read in the last few months, less than my usual amount due to the MBA. It didn’t really seem a lot to me, but it seemed a lot to the other people.

Access to knowledge is the most fundmental right, one which we’re in danger of losing. Media concentration, government censorship and reader apathy are stripping us of the ability to make intelligent, informed decisions. That’s why it’s worth “wasting” such a neat building on a library – to signify just how important an institution it is, you uncultured little snot.

in Culture / Opinion 4 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Adverse Selection

Economic theory can explain everything, even the mundane. Consider the market for lemon cars and the concept of adverse selection. Economists have developed an entire story to explain why, due to imperfect information, only lemon cars are sold in the used car market. And the story goes a little something like this:

(And a one, and a two, and a…)

Let’s say there’s a used car market consisting solely of two people who want to sell their car. Call these people Alice and Eve. Alice has a great car in perfect condition with low mileage; Eve has a similar car, but she’s had nothing but problems with the vehicle and wants to get rid of it. To a potential buyer, Bob, the cars appear to be equivalent. Alice knows she’s got a good car and therefore expects to sell the car for price P. Eve knows she’s got a lemon and therefore expects to sell the car for price X, where X is less than P. Simple enough, right?

Eve notices that her car appears equivalent to Alice’s car and realizes that she could probably charge more than X. After all, how is Bob to know the difference? So, Eve will try to sell her car at some price greater than X, but less than P. Alice notices that her car appears equivalent to Eve’s car, suggesting that Bob will value her car at the same value as Eve’s car. As a result, Alice chooses not to sell her car in the market because she won’t get the price she wants for the car. This leaves Eve’s car as the only available option in the used car market.

Only lemons? Ouch! Doesn’t sound like the kind of market you want to be buying from!

Consumers can protect themselves by attempting to compensate for this information gap using insurance title searches, consumer reports, or independent certification by a mechanic. But in a market filled with millions of products, not just cars, is this feasible? Consider my experience with my wife’s Sony laptop: great company, good brand reputation, garbage product. Even with the product’s recent bad publicity, how many people are being “taken” by Sony’s inferior laptop products? A heckuva lot, I’m willing to bet.

Bad products are like spam. Most people won’t buy products advertised in spam, but if even one in a million recipients buy the product, the company sending the spam is ahead of the game. Similarly, if just enough people get suckered into buying a crappy product, another company earns a few more bucks it doesn’t really deserve. And you, as the customer in either case, are left with yet another penis enhancer that doesn’t work.

Now if that isn’t a depressing conclusion, I don’t know what is.

in Business 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Is Life Too Easy?

Something has been bothering me for the past several months, namely the thought that perhaps life is too easy these days. I don’t just mean that on a personal level, as in “my life has been too easy”, but also on a wider level. It begs the question: is Darwinism dead?

Humans exist for one purpose: to breed. As much as we might be interested in higher purposes, such as artistic or scientific pursuits, the fact remains that these are superfluous activities. Your only priorities as a human being can be broken down into three simple steps:

  1. Stay alive.
  2. Breed.
  3. Repeat (if possible).

Sad, but true. As a kid, I was always under the misguided impression that grown-ups were subject to significant obstacles to achieve Step 1. You had to get a job. Getting a job was hard. You had to buy food and shelter. Food and shelter cost a lot. Et cetera. But now I find that none of those are anywhere near as hard as I once thought. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like jobs fall into my lap or I’m a millionaire, but I’ve achieved success insofar as I’ve completed Step 1 for a sufficiently long enough period of time as to allow me to proceed onto Step 2 and consider my life’s work complete.

(Allow me to digress for a moment and state for the record this is not a subtle attempt to reveal my success in achieving Step 2. I have no intention of unleashing my demon spawn on the world until a much later date when the appropriate invasion plan has been formulated.)

So that’s it?!? I’m almost done?

Come to think of it, I’ve really been a bit of an overachiever. If I were really on top of my game, I would have moved onto Step 2 shortly after high school and taken the rest of eternity off for completing my assignment early. This is the path that many take and are they really any worse off? Sure, they may not live a luxurious lifestyle due to their lack of education or opportunity, but they’ve still succeeded in what counts from an evolutionary point of view. In today’s world, it’s pretty hard not to succeed on this evolutionary basis, at least at Steps 1 and 2.

The ease with which evolutionary success can be achieved makes me wonder if the fittest are really the ones that are surviving in today’s society. Is the human race dragging along genetic flotsam and jetsam that should have long ago been culled from the gene pool? But if it should have been culled, why wasn’t it? It almost seems as if the success of the human race to easily overcome evolutionary hurdles like predation and disease is enough to suggest that there is no higher purpose than Steps 1 and 2. Oh, and Step 3, time permitting.

in Opinion / Personal 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

A Better Way

Universities puzzle me in their approach to teaching students. Equally puzzling is the metrics we use to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of university education. These institutions are the engines of innovation, yet despite the constant influx of public funds into unviersities, they seem to exist in a perpetual state of under-funding. How could we improve the university system to maximize the value for dollar?

To start with: could we be getting more value out of professors’ time? It seems to me that professors spend an inordinate amount of time on activities that could be consolidated across institutions. For example, how many professors prepare new notes, slides, exam questions and assignments for a course that they’re teaching for the first time? And yet how few of those professors pass that material along to the next professor that teaches the course?

Wouldn’t it make sense for any material prepared by a professor to be shared as widely as possible? Of course, some in the academic community point out that this material is subject to copyright, but come on people, just how many different ways is it possible to reincarnate the material in a first year physics course? Isn’t sharing information a core principle in the heart of the academic community?

A first step: establish an open source online repository for learning materials that professors can check out, update as required, and check back in. I envision a library of notes, quiz questions, exam questions and lab experiments that educators could mix and match as required by their course. As the best and brightest minds make incremental improvements to the materials in response to student feedback, the repository would approach the “best” way to present university material.

The potential benefits to professors are enormous: less time on class preparation, less time spent by students on copying down notes (assuming all the materials are available electronically) leading to better class discussions and improved comprehension of class material. Universities could even eliminate course textbooks, allowing them to raise tuition without protest; after all, what’s an extra $20 a credit hour if you don’t have to spend $100 on a course textbook?

With such a repository of learning materials, quiz and exam questions, it would only be a matter of time before people started knitting this information together into comprehensive online courseware. Imagine being able to sit at your computer, read about a topic, answering questions after each section of reading to test your understanding. The next step would be intelligent software that would “branch” after each set of questions, proceeding to the next topic if you achieved a satisfactory score on the questions, or proceeding to an alternate format of presenting the material if you didn’t. Really intelligent software might even customize its choice of presentation format over time to match a student’s preferred learning style (learn by example, visual learner, etc).

Why aren’t we doing this now? Well, in fact there are a number of efforts to produce these learning object repositories using existing technologies, such as XML and the World Wide Web. But the development of this technology has been slow, most likely the result of how we evaluate the effectiveness of our university education system. You only have to look at the methodology used to generate university rankings, such as Maclean’s University Rankings or the Financial Times MBA Rankings, to realize that university rankings have little to do with the quality of education received by students. Since when was the number of publications generated by faculty a reliable measure of how well a student is being taught? Or the amount of grants received by faculty?

If we’re really concerned about how well the minds of tomorrow are being shaped, we need to re-align our method for evaluating and ranking universities to coincide with our goals for post-secondary education. Only in that fashion will the incentives be properly fashioned to prompt universities to take the corrective actions required to adopt new teaching technology, freeing professors to do more research done and, in turn, improve our country’s ability to innovate.

in Opinion 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Mental Spasmastics

In this week’s episode: the slow, ponderous march to war continues. At the risk of inducing the mental equivalent of a charlie horse, I’ve continued to try to follow the United States’ logic in its argument for attacking Iraq. Let me get this straight: the US is pushing for the UN to punish Iraq for breaching an earlier UN resolution and if the UN doesn’t comply the US will…breach a UN resolution?!? Ow, ow, ow! Can anyone say “doublethink“?

Meanwhile, the United States continues to act like a spoiled frat jock, delivering political wedgies and noogies for all who oppose them. Consider this little gem:

“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. All you do is leave behind a lot of noisy baggage.”

Who said it? If you said “Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense”, you win the grand prize: unilateral US military action!

Don’t get me wrong, Saddam’s a bad guy. But there are a lot of bad guys in the world and the US doesn’t seem to normally have any problem trading with any of them on a regular basis. Heck, they’ve even armed and trained them on occasion. And only now the US chooses to play John Wayne and clean up the Wild West? Oh, that’s right. Now there’s more money in ousting them than arming them.

The problem is the US doesn’t recognize the hypocrisy it displays in promoting its own brand of democracy: freedom, liberty and democracy for all, just as long as you agree with us and let us do whatever the hell we want. As Bill Maher pointed out in his recent book, “When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden“, the reason the outside world hates the US is because it is so painfully clueless about why the outside world should even have reason to hate the US.

Politicians such as Rumsfeld are supposed to not only possess the ability to adeptly build consensus but also the intelligence to use that ability. Incendiary comments such as those of Rumsfeld only reinforce the stereotype of the US as a spoiled, self-absorbed child that takes its ball home when people don’t play by its rules. And then it wonders why people want to do crazy things like, say, fly planes into buildings.

in Opinion / Politics 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Wacko Jacko

Exams are over for the moment, so that means it’s time to turn the ol’ brain off. And I expected there’d be nothing better than a TV special like “Living with Michael Jackson” to put synaptic activity into full retreat, perhaps to the point where my brain would crawl out my ear and run down the hall for cover. Such was the state of vegetabledom I was seeking after last week. Unfortunately, the exposé of the King of Pop’s personal life turned out to be just too damn interesting. Curses! Foiled again!

First, let me just say that I’m not a Michael Jackson fan, at least not lately. Though I like his earlier material, I suspect my appreciation of his music is limited to a Pavlovian association with the image of my first grade teacher, Mrs. Donovan, teaching us aerobics in a one-piece leotard. Ah, catholic school. It’s not as bad as you would have thought.

Alas, I digress.

The King of Pop bared it all: Never Never Land, his mansion, his lifestyle. What was interesting about the interview was just how painfully shy Jackson is, even about things for which he’s world-renown, such as his dancing. More surprising was the frankness with which Jackson discussed his own upbringing, complete with the stories about how his father would watch the Jackson Five rehearse dance steps brandishing his belt in his hand. Jackson’s upbringing was, in a word, brutal. His stories revealed the extent to which he had been deprived of his childhood, providing ample explanation for his childlike behaviour later in life.

The interview touched other subjects, such as the amount of surgery Jackson had done to his face. Though Jackson had revealed earlier that his own father had taunted him about his complexion, he denied having extensive cosmetic surgery. This topic seemed too close to a point of extreme personal pain. The interviewer also pressed Jackson on the inappropriateness of the Never Never Land sleepovers that had continued despite the allegations of child abuse in the nineties. Jackson just doesn’t seem to understand why this would be inappropriate – in many ways, he is still an innocent. I, for one, don’t believe his interest in children is anything other than an extension of his own desire to reclaim his childhood.

The most interesting thing about the program was watching how people reacted to Jackson in public. People who were allowed past his security were only interested in one thing: a hug. The people were visibly moved when Jackson hugged them, to the point of tears in most cases. It reminded me of a documentary in Ireland, in which the narrator traveled throughout the world to find religious experiences. In India, he found the one experience that actually moved him, a hug from an Indian woman who travels across India, giving people hugs. People would line up for hours for a hug from this woman. The effect that she had on these people was exactly the same as Jackson’s effect on his fans.

It seemed the only thing Jackson wants these days is to protect his kids and spread love. The sad thing is how suspicious we are of his intentions, a reflection of our own mistrust of a society which espouses one set of values but lives by and values a completely different set of values. So who’s crazy: Jackson, or us?

in Culture / Entertainment 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Pay To Live

There was a time when the cost of leisure was only the opportunity cost (the income forgone by not working) and the cost of your entertainment. But times have changed. The cost of entertainment is ever increasing, but not to worry, Hollywood has new ways to keep your entertainment affordable. All it’ll cost you is a little more of your precious leisure time.

The mechanism I’m talking about: CSS, the DVD Content Scrambling System. As part of the mechanism for protecting DVDs, the Copyright Control Authority added functionality to the DVD specification that would prevent users from skipping sections of playback. Typically, this is used at the beginning of the DVD to force users to watch the FBI copyright infringement warning. However, various DVD titles have started to use this feature for another purpose, a practice which I predict will only flourish: forced advertisement.

Anyone who’s gone to a movie theatre and paid for a movie knows the frustration of having to sit through advertisements for cars, Coke, and any number of other products. What a rub. I pay $12 for the movie, $10 for the popcorn, and now I have to watch advertisements in addition to the “Coming Attractions” before the movie starts?!? Welcome to the world of “consumer lock-in”. You’re a captive market, ready to be exploited. Now imagine when this intrusion comes home.

You’ve bought a DVD, hence you have the right to watch it again and again. Yet now, you’ll have to sit through the advertisements at the beginning of the DVD each and every time you want to watch the movie. Will you see the price of DVDs decrease? No. In fact, more than likely you’ll see the emergence of a new market: DVDs without advertisements. And they’re going to cost you more.

The DVD standard has refined this technology to state of the art. Not only can they force you to watch segments of the DVD, the CCA can also force you to buy a DVD title multiple times in multiple regions. Embedded in each DVD is a region code that specifies where a DVD can be played. DVD players enforce this region encoding. So, for example, a DVD you purchased in Europe can’t be played in North America. Even though you possess a valid license for the media, you can’t play the media on any North American DVD player. This technology enables media creators to practice price discrimination between regions.

Imagine if this trend extended outside the world of digital entertainment. Imagine if the manufacturers of eyeglasses decided to leverage their captive audience and embed partially transparent advertisements into the lenses of glasses they manufactured. Want a pair without the ads? It’ll cost you. The possibilities are endless. Everywhere you look or listen is another opportunity for advertisers to invade your attention. Think spam is annoying? Think again.

Just be glad this hasn’t happened to books. Yet.

in Culture / Opinion / Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

If Life Gives You Lemons…

The fine folks at Urban Fare have done it again, bringing you merchandise that tops even their previous exotic and downright weird offerings. Once you see these, you’ll wonder how you ever survived those hectic martini parties without these little beauties: star lemons!

Star Lemons - Only $5.00!And what, pray tell, is a “star lemon”? Why, it’s a star shaped like a lemon, of course! No, wait. That’s not it. It’s a lemon with a cross-section in the shape of a star. Yeah, that’s it. No more spending hour after hour getting your drink and plate garnish just right. Now you can just slice and go! Isn’t that worth $5.00 a lemon?

Unlike the square watermelon, I wasn’t able to find any information about this particular incarnation of Japanese fruit shape sculpting. I can only assume that the lemons are created in the same fashion as the watermelons, using a glass enclosure into which the fruit are placed while they are still growing.

Though on the one hand, I consider this a tremendous waste of energy and human ingenuity, on the other hand I suppose there is a positive side to this product. Rather than cutting up lemons into stars and throwing away the leftovers created in the process, no leftovers are generated. Just slice, and away you go!

A star shaped lemon and its cross sectionIt’s especially funny talking to the cashiers at Urban Fare about some of the products they carry. It must suck working 8 hour days for minimum wage only to watch some lazy-ass empty-nester blow their RRSP nest egg on fruit that’s $5 a pop, $500 a pound coffee, and $100 watermelons.

Such are the responsibilities of the jet set Baby Boom cohort. Eat, drink and avoid slicing lemons, for tomorrow we die! Time has to be spared at any cost, I guess, because no one’s getting any younger. And someone out there is always happy to sell that time back to them at a hefty markup, because if they don’t, someone else will.

But isn’t anyone asking if that’s a good enough reason?

in Opinion 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

What Is Value?

It’s a slippery issue: what is value? By this I mean, what is the value that a customer is willing to pay for? In my MBA’s marketing class, the term “value” is thrown around an awful lot, but it’s always left in intangible terms. Then again, is there really such a thing as tangible value?

When I go shopping, what are the tangible properties of an item I buy? The physical form of the product itself. Embodied in this physical form are explicit attributes, such as the function the product performs or how well it performs that function. But there are also a number of implicit attributes of the product that I’m also paying for: the “quality” of the product, the prestige of the product, and the convenience of where I bought the item.

The value of some of these explicit and implicit attributes can be measured quantifiably. For example, I can measure the item’s performance and then value that performance based on how much I might save in time or money by buying the item versus not buying it. I might value the item’s “convenience” value by determining the cost to me to buy a comparable item in another location.

But what about prestige? How do I value prestige? Prestige value is related to the way people’s impression of me is altered by me buying the item. But what is the value of other people’s opinion of me? If the item causes me to gain access to a new job, I suppose I could value it in terms of how my income changes. But that’s a tenuous link, one that hardly might only apply to an Armani suit, but not a pair of Converse canvas sneakers. So what’s left?

The issue that prompted this line of consideration was a business case we studied last term. In the case, BC Packers, a local salmon and tuna cannery, was considering entering the canned cat food industry. It had to determine whether to enter the low-priced segment, the national brand segment, or the premium-priced segment. What disturbed me was the fact that we could apply different values to exactly the same product. It didn’t seem reasonable to me that we should be able to, for example, charge twice the price for a premium brand as for a price brand, just because our advertising campaign tickled some endorphins from some single female in her mid-thirties who views her cat as a child substitute. Sure, we have extra costs incurred in the form of advertising, but was it worth that much?

Then I realized that the attributes I had deemed “quantifiable” weren’t quantifiable at all! Sure, they could be quantified in terms of money and time, but how could you value those things? If time is money, then the reverse is true, hence I’ve only quantified tings in terms of time. What is my time but a human perception of its surroundings; and what is my value of prestige but my perception of other’s value of me?

It would seem that “value” is a shorthand for perception and time. Our time is finite and hence so is our opportunity for perception. That leads me to believe that no matter what product we’re purchasing, the finite length of our lives means that we’re ultimately buying more time. Time to live. Time to experience. Time to earn an income. And, of course, time enough to buy more time. Hence, “value” ends up being a balance between our ability to pay and our desire to live our life more fully.

There is no logic to value. We pay what we’re willing and able to pay and no less.

in Business 0 comments