Jananas

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise given that I’ve mentioned it previously, but I’m taking Richard Florida’s Creative Regional Strategies course here at Rotman. Over the course of the term we’ve worked towards producing a set of final recommendations on a city of our choice, in our case we have focused on Vancouver. Thus far we’ve produced reports on: overall growth, technology, talent, tolerance, and territory assets (count ‘em and yes, there are 4T’s).

In class this week we presented our set of final recommendations. Like any set of final development recommendations, these are meant to be inspirational and to enable long term growth. One of the people asked to sit in on the presentations, [aside, to disclose this person is a member of the team at the Martin Prosperity Institute] was very aggressive in their questioning. Its been bugging me a bit, so I thought I’d write about it.

Here was our thinking & one of our recommendations:

• As with any development recommendation, the end result is that we want our region to grow. A growing economy also means a growing population.
• Vancouver has one of the highest costs of living in the world (based on median income vs. housing cost) and a relatively high density. We also found that the city has fewer young, single creative class people in part due to the high housing costs. So, if Vancouver’s population grows and they remain in the current area of the city the increase in demand will also drive up housing costs given that density cannot be changed significantly in the short term (real estate economics here). But increasing housing costs means that fewer people can afford to live in the city and more young people will be driven away.
• Vancouver is constrained by their geography: mountains to the North, ocean to the West, and the US border to the South. This makes expansion difficult.
• As a result of this natural tension between growth and geography, we recommended that they look to expanding Eastwards (so through towards Chilliwack). As with any proposal for expansion, this can only be accomplished with a simultaneous strengthening of transit and more specifically public transit (hey, we why don’t we throw out the ever popular high speed train idea).

To summarize: we want the city to grow, growth means increase in people which in today’s city will drive up prices farther making city even more expensive and driving out more of the young creative class workers. Because of geographic constraints, there are limited expansion opportunities.

The feedback and questioning from one of our assessors was, I felt, aggressive. The gist was we were idiots for expanding east as we were merely promoting urban sprawl. That it wouldn’t be possible due to existing infrastructure issues. That it wouldn’t work because no one would commute.

Let’s go over this.

• First, we aren’t promoting the stereotypical suburban sprawl but rather the use of satellite cities well served by public transportation to make the city more liveable. Growth has to go somewhere, so let’s make that growth be as productive as possible.
• Second, as with any set of development recommendations we suggested improving the infrastructure. Which means that we recognize that this can’t be done successfully with the current transportation system. Yeah you? Thanks for coming out and paying attention. And really, these are high level recommendations not detailed implementation plans.
• Last is the concept that people won’t commute.  Some people won’t commute (hey, I’m one of them!) but that does not mean that no one will commute. Look to any major city (for example, Toronto) – people commute well across the city in order to get to jobs. This is really just basic economics – commuting costs vs. the opportunity cost of time.

My gut reaction is that the feedback was motivated more by personal dislike of our recommendations and less by real economic analysis of our assumptions and conclusion. I believe that the person marking us was thinking “I’d never commute” rather than “no one would commute”. Big difference.

To end, I would like to take credit for having thought up this final point while I was in class and that I was tactful enough to not say anything, but… I wasn’t. In a typical life moment I thought this up as I walked out of the building.

Vancouver doesn’t have to expand East (since you seem to dislike that concept so much). Instead, we recommend that they drag over the Texas-sized island of floating garbage currently floating unused in the Pacific Ocean. I mean really, anchor that in Vancouver harbor and build on top of it.

Oh wait, I guess that would ruin those beaches that Vancouver is known for. But hey, at least all those environmental freaks would have something to protest against! I mean, we’d be adding to the economy judged only by the increase in pickets…

Back in February, I’d asked Jason to buy me tickets to see Flight of the Conchords for one of their Toronto dates in April. I can’t remember the exact reasoning, but I was unable to be at a computer when they went on sale and I was worried that they’d sell out. So he, being the exceedingly nice person that he is, woke up early one day to purchase tickets for me. He used his American ticketmaster account and his Canadian credit card (he’s an authorized user on one of my accounts so that he doesn’t have to pay foreign exchange fees). Sadly, because he purchased tickets to a Canadian show on an American ticketmaster account his only option was to pick them up the day of the show through will call. Fast forward a month or so, and with travel plans he’s not going to be in Toronto the day of the concert and so will be unable to pick them up.

On March 17th he emails ticketmaster to see if we can arrange an alternate delivery method for the tickets – picking them up in advance, mailing, or printing out at home. He received this response on March 19th:

So, we’ve paid for “premium” tickets but can’t arrange another way to get them. Jason wrote back that day as this didn’t really answer our question. We received this response on March 21st:

Okay, so we don’t often actually read purchase policies before making purchases. But… We’re haven’t asked to have a second party pick up our tickets or to switch the credit card. What we have asked is to use an alternative delivery method so that we can receive the product that we have paid for. Jason emailed them back again on March 29th asking for this to be escalated, and we received this response:

So basically, because we used an American account to purchase tickets we only have one option. Sadly because circumstances have change and Jason (as the credit card holder) cannot pick these tickets up, we are being told that Ticketmaster is going to keep our money and we get nothing in return. Note, we have also not had our concern escalated and so are stuck dealing with front line reps with no authority.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but it seems like changes in delivery would be a fairly common occurrence and that as an international company you should be able to deal with these types of customer service issues. To add insult to injury, every single response we received had the following phrase at the bottom: “Did I provide World Class Service?” Thanks for adding insult to injury folks.

Jason e-mailed back on April 4th, again asking for this to be escalated. We have yet to receive a response.

The end result is that I am instigating a chargeback with my credit card company. I paid money for a product (access to a concert) and ticketmaster is being unreasonable in providing limited delivery methods for that product. As such, I will not be able to see the concert and so will have paid good money for something that they are preventing me from seeing. Here’s to hoping that my credit card company won’t provide equally terrible customer service.

To Flight of the Conchords, I’m pretty bummed that I won’t get to see you in concert. I’ve been a fan since early in the first season (I even purchased two copies of it when it dropped to dvd) and have been avidly watching this season. I was really looking forward to getting to see you live. Sadly, due to ticketmaster I won’t get the chance.

I’m editor of this year’s Rotman yearbook. I’ve been pretty impressed with what I’ve been able to accomplish thus far.

1. I’ve brought the yearbook committee under the wing of our student council. Before it was a free floating group with no authority and no accountability.
2. I’ve made some changes to the software we use to do layouts and the printing method, and as a result…
3. I’ve been able to bring down the price per book from $40 at a loss to $25 at a profit.
4. I’ve also been able to get funding from our student council to help subsidize the cost of shipping the books to students (many didn’t buy them as they wouldn’t be around to pick them up after graduation).
5. I’ve also increased the content so that it includes more of the student body (so increasing the focus on the three year program) and more of the awesome social events that make Rotman a fun place to go to school. This widens the audience we can sell to and makes us more relevant.

Right now, I’m trying to get students to buy the book. Which means that I need to communicate information about the sale and then badger the hell out of the students to actually do something (like read their e-mails and click on a link).

So here’s my problem – I have no idea how many students have actually bought books since the e-mail went out yesterday morning. The only sales I’m aware of are those when students have told me in person. Sales are completed online through one of the school’s websites. And there are zero back end analytics. Yup, zero. I believe that is referred to as negative awesome. I need this information so that I can sell appropriately. For example, I don’t want to hassle students with daily e-mails if the majority of the student body has already purchased a book.

How on earth can you be a business school and not understand the importance of reporting, analytics, and the impacts of both on decision making? And I don’t think I’m terrible out of line to expect the school that is supposedly teaching me about these things to also be able to put them into practice.

So Rotman, you fail this one!

Overall, Rotman does a very good job at listening to student feedback and incorporating suggestions into future years. I think that their willingness to try and to change/fine tune the program is a real strength. One of the neat ways we, as students, can provide feedback is through anonymous emails to our professors. I sent one this week for the first time in my time at Rotman.

This is what I saw when I opened it up. Yup, that little red box is the entire window for entering text/the email. Not only does it look ridiculous against my otherwise pristine & empty white screen, its also functionally useless I can’t read what I’ve written and I certainly can’t follow my thoughts to make sure they’re coherent & sensible.

Its poor design choices like this that make me question your commitment to student feedback. By making the box so small the message I receive is that you don’t want me to send anon feedback and are willing to make the process as difficult and unpleasant as possible. For a school that touts its design focus, you might want to think about how your internal designs affect the students. If we don’t experience it, then we’re not going to act as good brand managers for you in the future. Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of the anonymous email, you might just want to work on the execution.

I walk past the Bohemian Embassy sales office on a fairly regular basis. They have the following sign in their parking area. The part that I love is that “unauthorized vehicles will be tagged“.

Notice that they say tagged. Not towed, tagged. Are they going to put a toe tag on my car like they would if I was a dead body in the morgue. Do they pay a gang of hooligans to hang out in the back alley, waiting for an authorized vehicle so that they can jump out and spraypaint my car with their poor graffiti tags. I’m not really sure how effective this “threat” can be given that it makes me giggle at their less than effective choice of verbiage.