The Hair Shop blog

What a blast

To all my classmates that have shared this learning experience with me I say thank you. Each of you have added to my knowledge of marketing and made this adventure an exciting one.

Shannon I know this is the only Marketing class I have had you in, but I think you have what it takes to make it a carreer if you choose. You are extremely intelligent.

Jerome it has been fun, you truly should consider teaching. Your well thought out comments and arguments have impressed me from day one.

Connie you are an inspiration, if you do not believe it just ask your daughter who is now following in your footsteps to acquire her degree.

PJ I can see it inside of you just waiting to bust out. The talent is amazing and I think when it happens it will surprise no one except you. Because we have all seen it from the beginning.

Mrs. Vargas, thank you for everything. You teach with such passion that it is impossible not to get excited about what we are learning. Your knowledge of the subject is without question and you treat us all as equals. I can see it in your eyes when we finally comprehend what you are trying to teach us, you get as excited as we do for finally understanding it. That is a sign of a professor that truly cares about her students and the subject they are teaching. It also has been a tremendous pleasure watching you grow as a teacher. After having you in your initial class to know and to see you grow right along with us was remarkable. Thank you for the experience, thank you for the knowledge and thank you for helping me change and grow.

Well this to is my last class in the Marketing cycle; therefore the blog will be a thing of the past. Or will it?

If I can ever get the funding for my business I think I will keep this blog and turn it into an start up entrepreneur blog on the trials and tribulations. Then maybe (if I can figure out how connect it and make it The Hair Shop’s blog by maybe talking to my stylist contractors and posting the questions they get and the answers to them for discussion.

See Mrs. Vargas you are turning me into an old techno geek.

Who to service

When you back is against the wall and you orders are so high that the short term and mid term out look is bleak as far as servicing all of you customers, who do you service.

Well this is a question that a supplier of ours faced and we were on the short end of the proverbial stick. With all the natural disasters that befell the US over the last few years the building industry was going through the roof, and all the manufactures of building supplies were scrambling to add capacity to meet the demand. Well our tube supplier was not able to react so they were in the position that they could supply 70% of their customers and they would have to tell the remaining that they were on allocation and what they got was all they had to give. This basically put the 30% in a position that if they wanted to supply their customers they would have to switch suppliers.

How did they make this decision, well it was not based off of the fact that we were their largest or at least one of the top two. Also not base on the fact that we had plans to expand and increase orders by 12% the following year. No it was based of the fact that they made the lowest margin off of us VS all the other companies. So they made a very short-term decision and did not consider the long-term effects. Yes the made more money with what they had in the moment, but now that the market is down the smaller companies are going out of business and they are knocking on our door wanting back in because they do not have enough volume to run their plant effectively. Will we let them back in, well the person that makes the decision to let them in would probably get fired after what they did to us by just flat hanging us out to dry with no warning. So the answer is no, will we let them keep bidding for our business. Why yes we will, they are shooting very low prices at us and in a competitive E auction (online bid to become our new supplier) they are proving to be very beneficial.

The person that made the decision on who to drop made a very near sighted decision and did not consider the long term value of the account or the long term consequences of losing an account this large. Some times making the decision based off of quick cash is the wrong thing to do, you must always remember that maket spikes come and go and the long term market out look is a key to making good decisions.

Caraustar

Sonoco

Fischbach USA

Who do you hire

There is a question posed on page 293 in the textbook, and that question is.

Do you select leaders based on A) their willingness and ability to teach and learn? B) The degree to which they credit the work of others and obtain satisfaction from the development and success of others?

Interesting question, too which I reply both A and B if at all possible. A good leader must be willing to continue to learn and expand but at the same time they need to teach and grow their staff. This is how a company takes a talented workforce and continues to grow what they have. But the leader must be willing to give credit where credit is due and be proud of the fact that their team came up with the idea or plan. After all it was done under your tutelage and guidance so a team member with a great idea or plan only reflects positively upon you and your skills.

I see many managers who come in to meetings and talk about this great plan that they have and all the while we know that it was one of their employees ideas, but they never mention the employees name. This shines a terrible light upon the manager in my opinion and causes decent amongst that managers employees. We are such a small plant that when a project or a change is made we inform all employees of what it is and we post it. This is terrible for moral and promoting team work, while most people will do without a raise they want their name recognized and feel slighted (which they should) when they are not given credit for something that they did.

I personally worked on a cost out project with another manager in our plant that reduced our raw material inventory by 1.5 million dollars and saved the company over 700 thousand dollars in warehousing and transportation fees. When the WOW award came down it was given to my plant manager and another plant manager. Now I know and my fellow manager know that we did the work and really we were not upset that we did not get our share of the $3000 bonus. We were upset that our name was not mentioned and we did not have the achievement placed in our file.

Which part would you have been upset with?

Giving credit

3 C's

Tragedy of the Commons and Blogging

A common is any resource used as though it belongs to all, so anyone can used a shared resouce simply because one has the want or the need to. A good example is give by John Hanson on the website

"In 1944, 29 reindeer were moved to St. Matthew Island. The reindeer thrived by "exploiting" (making the best use of) their rich "commons".

The island had no natural predators to keep the reindeer population in check, so the population swelled to 6,000 animals during the next 19 years. Suddenly the commons was depleted and the population crashed until only 42 animals remained alive! The reindeer could have avoided the crash by keeping the population within the carrying capacity of the island, but reindeer politics couldn't manage it, so naturally the population crashed."

In the book An Army of Davids chapter 5 it talks about whether the blog-o-sphere will fall to the tragedy of the commons. This is a very good point since there are many new blogs being published daily one might think that we will run out of space and people interested and it will crash. But the issue is most blogs are there because people want to put their opinion out there for others to see. Since most of these are not money making endeavors how will it crash, the tragedy of the commons suffers when the resouces are used up. I am not sure that peoples opinions will ever be used up and as long as someone has an opinion there will always be a person that either agrees or disagrees with them. With billions of people in the world that have not accessed the computer yet to see what others are thinking or to give there opinion or tell their story, I say blogging is just getting started.

For those ran as a business they will be guided by the invisible hand just as the rest of the economy should be. If they are original and are seen to provide value to the readers then they will thrive. Those who do not will be eliminated.

Playing the PDG

The Prisoneer Dilemma Game, a game that is similar to tic tac toe in that it is a win lose game. It is a Non-zero sum game which allows fo cooperation, because there are moves that benifit both players. An emample given on the Princenton link below is that you and Albert were picked up by the police and interrogated in seperate cells without a chance to talk with one another. Whether you are guilty or not does not matter in the game.

You are both told the same thing,

If you both confess, you will both get four years in prison.

If neither of you confesses, the police will be able to pin part of the crime on you, and you'll both get two years.

If one of you confesses but the other doesn't, the confessor will make a deal with the police and will go free while the other one goes to jail for five years.

The irony is that it seems that you are better off confessing, but the fact is that if both refuse to confess and work together then you will be much better off. It is usefull in demonstrating the evolution of co-operative behavior.

As a society we are all better off if we work together by cooperating, but there are some advantages of working to improve your situation and ingnoring the situations of others.

There are several different sites that you can go to and play against a computer.

PDG in a card game form

PDG site

Another PDG site

Princeton