Please Solve This Issue Someone

Thought for the day, THIS bothers me. I can't think of a way to profit off of it, but I'm open to suggestions, please let me know. The only thing I could think of is using the empty space to transport coal to China, coal is cheap to mine here and China is a huge importer of coal. The problem I keep running into is that intermodal shipping containers are poor transports of coal and returning the containers to their pre-coal carrying cleanliness would have to be an absolute imperative responsibility. I keep thinking of some way to transport the coal in a bulk manner and conveyor it to railcars to take directly to a power plant, but I can't think of a way to do this and still take all the empty containers back to the factories making all of that inexpensive awesome Chinese stuff I love so much. If you have a solution to this problem please let me know and I'll give you $5 when I make my first million.

War Eagle

This past weekend, my lovely girlfriend and myself decided to take in some of the local sights and events, so we attended the War Eagle Fair on Saturday. The event itself is actually less of a regular fair and more about arts, crafts, and people peddling overpriced homemade stuff. We had been informed of the event by some people at my work and then some others here in the MBA program, they told me it was going to be big, but I had no idea how big it actually is.

We left the apartment around 9:30 on Saturday, made a quick stop by the farmers market in Fay-town to peruse the fruits and veggies, then we were off to War Eagle (which is apparently a very small city/mill/stream in addition to a yearly crafts fair). We then spent the next two hours in traffic waiting to park at the fair, it was a flippin' zoo! After we finally parked, we strolled through the various booths. My general rule of thumb after being there, the small stuff is overpriced, the big stuff is priced right/comparatively under-priced, I'm not sure if there's some kind of economic principle here or not, if I can think of something I'll try to post about it. We didn't get much beyond the expected and typical fried food and kettle corn, but the one thing we did get that I really liked was a small silver ring for the Novia (girlfriend in Spanish) at a booth with antiques. My guess (actually wishful desire) is that the ring was cherished by some sweet old lady for many years, she passed away, the vendor picked it up at an estate sale, and now we have it, and we can start the cycle over again. It might not be the case, but I can hope. My conclusion about War Eagle, it's pretty cool, but leave early, like really early.

After the Fair, we went back to the apartment and watched the Razorbacks get absolutely hosed by the officials. On the bright side, thanks to the generosity of a local optometrist, SEC teams should be spared from future officiating blunders. The Razorbacks game wasn't the only officiating problem in the SEC this weekend, check out this video and see if you laugh as much as I did.

Currently

Currently I am sitting in a dark room behind a one way mirror looking at six U of A undergrads and a graduate student,I swear it's not what it sounds like. I'm not a creeper or anything, but for this one day I'm posing as a marketing researcher. The grad student is in a group of mine for our marketing research class and we're conducting some primary research into body wash. We're in kind of an exploratory stage right now, trying to decipher what it is we're actually going to study, so a focus group seemed like a good way to help boil down our research goals. We're videotaping and recording the audio from the group and my other group members are taking notes, something I should probably be doing right now, but it also seems like a good time to blog, so that's what I'm going to do.

These past couple weeks sure have been interesting, we just finished up our last midterm this morning, it was actually the final for a half-semester class on ethics. The class was nice, and something I really enjoyed was that it stayed away from academic ethics almost entirely and instead we debated Enron, Wal-Mart's green initiatives, and various other ethical cases. While the acedemic theories are great (I'm a cultural relativist with a firm belief in social contract theory, I know, somewhat contradictory) they don't represent the issues, challenges, and gray areas facing many global and multinational corporations in today's "flat" world.

I'm going to wrap it up soon here and get back to the real world, but I just want to speak to something I harped on last time I posted. Being at this school, in this MBA program, provides so many opportunities for interacting with the most powerful people in industry. Just last Wednesday, most of the MBA program got to go attend a conference with Proctor and Gamble CEO Bob McDonald, Wal-Mart US CEO Bill Simon, and Google US Sales Director Jim Lecinski. For my money, Lecinski was by far the best speaker and his presentation on the "zero moment of truth" was the kind of deep insight not seen from the more generalized CEO's.

In the near future, the Czar will be guest posting, he's still trying to think of a topic.