Bucket List

Finance:
Brother Andrews first grilled us on our business plan and talked to us about an executive summary. Both Trey and I were in B383 (New Venture Creation) and we were pretty silent. I'm pretty sure Trey didn't want to come off as the know it all for that subject, or he was just intimidated by Brother Andrews' ridiculing statements if he accidentally said something wrong. I know that's why I kept silent. Brother Andrews told us that the purpose of an Executive Summary is to get the potential investor to turn the page and learn more. He mentioned something that appealed to me. "Idea Champion". Sounds like something I'd be interested in. It turns out to be a person that, when given an idea, will run with the idea and get things done. I would like to be that for our company.
Now he went onto the boring part of talking about finance and what it is, why it's studied and how it ties into everything we do in a company. things that were most important of that lecture were, "Make sure when you increase profit that you aim to increase Share holder value" and "Risk/return relationship: Best way is to lower risk and raise returns." Glad when that was over.

OB:
First we talked about the Trouble at Wilson's case. I didn't really read the case so when we were working on it as a team to turn in the paper today I was totally out of it. I gave stupid answers and I know now that if I had read it, I would have been much more of a help. When we turned it in after class we got it back, then we added the organization charts we were supposed to and I turned it into to him to only get it back right away and told to fix it. I guess I'll be working on that this weekend as well as the company stuff.

We went through a power point about time management... aka Event Management. We even got to watch Oprah! Ok well a lecture done by Randy Pausch called, "The Last Lecture." That was amazing. Watch the full lecture here. And a follow-up video.
After that we talked a bit about our z-goals. I had never heard of those before. Someone finally said, "Oh, like a bucket list!" For not seeing the movie I still knew the term. A list of things you want to do before you die, or "kick the bucket". I realized I don't really have any goals like that. Plus I don't really have any major priorities in life. So I thought this week is Fast Sunday, might as well fast for priorities and work on a mission statement with my wife. From the reading in 7 Habits I found out that most of my priorities fit into Quadrant II. Important but not Urgent. Wow! What and eye opener. I have some work to do.

Outside Class:
Today after a meeting with the Marketing team to get a poster done for our presentation of our idea, I decided to take some time and look into the future of our web business. I first talked to Brother Lundin. I had a class last semester with him on Web Businesses. Very informative, but my chat with him was better. He said it should be able to be done. The only thing needed for doing a paypal account is to have a local bank account. It turns out that can be done if we have a teacher sign up for it. That was some good news. Plus he said that President Clark has wanted us to branch out away from the student Lemonaid stands and be bigger than we have been.
I then talked to Brother Bell about the idea and he loved it. The best thing to hear from him was this, "If you have any problems come to me and we'll work on it."
I then went to Brother Holt, who was quite the downer. He is the biggest "nay sayers" for this whole ordeal. Worse than the students in my own company. They have tried to look into the web stuff and came up with the road blocks I found but had read more than they had apparently. Brother Holt had emailed me a two page paper. I guess the second sheet doesn't circulate as well, but it states we can use Pro-Stores. this is the news I wanted and the Web Teacher and the Department Chair are behind me. Then who could be against me? Now all I need to do is wait on a solidified name of our company and then I can talk to Bob Reed about getting our domain space on shop.byui.net. We'll see.

The Forcast for Today!

Supply Chain:
Brother Clark went over a brief (underpants) slide show about why we forecast. Again my mind was wondering, but I was able to jot down a few notes about forecasting helps us with financials and inventory, even marketing is helped by understanding forecasted figures. There are two types of forecasting, quantitative and qualitative. The most important thing to know about forecasting is that it is ALWAYS WRONG!
We then broke into our teams to figure our an Excel sheet with forecasting on it. We did pretty well and I learned a new trick called "TREND" It's the same as the formula of a line and that with it you can figure out a number by putting in an 'x' value. He called it a game but we had no source of winning. It was more of an exercise. And I enjoyed it.

Company Time:
We broke into our groups and talked a bit about ourselves to know what we want to see happen. I quickly distinguished myself as the internet and web guy. This is where I wanted to go and I hope to make some major changes in the way IBC looks at web businesses. Now I need to look into what to do with this information.

Domination!

Supply Chain:
Brother Clark had us play a game today. It was a really crazy game about finding the "Critical Path" and things would change during the game and it would alter which path was the "Critical Path" It was fun to work as a team on it and it turn out the the best you can do is spend $9300 and we were the only team to hit it. We were right on with the best course. We just made all the right decisions and spent the least. We rocked... We Dominated!You can't really see it but the screen is showing the numbers and the winning team. that took up that class period.

Finance was next but my mind was gone still from winning. I'm pretty sure it wasn't anything really big because Finance doesn't really start until Friday. Oh well. We're cool!

Racketeer

Supply Chain:
The first real day with Brother Clark. He told us a story of how he had tennis practice during lunch break and related it to not being a real game but it is good to keep up the strokes. IBC is much like that, there isn't everything of a real business, but we can learn a lot and keep up real strokes. He is really interesting to listen to, but he has the capability to make me lose my train of thought. Ok that's not entirely true, I have the choice, I can be proactive, but I had a tough time today staying focused.

We went over a chart he had created for finding the best racket for him. Here he is explaining it to us. It was really interesting to see the detail he put into and how to find something that is the best over all rather that settling. I think you will be most happy with the purchase/decision when you have put as much thought into it as possible and came to a conclusion rather than weigh quickly and go.
We then went over a powerpoint presentation. Unfortunately this one is not available for review here or on iLearn. One thing I did make mention to write down outside of the ppt file was this, “Efficiency is only good on easy processes”. That's good info.

Tuesdays and Thursdays:
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have only one class and then it's team/company time. We took the time to finalize a bit of our organization. Here are our officers. (L-R) Tyler Harper-COO, Matt Cox-HR, Stacey Hatch-CMO, Jonathan Sarlo-CFO, Jordan Judd-CEO. I think we have a great group.

Back and Better For It

Finance (sort of):
Chris Andrews lead us today and made fun of our companies and ideas. He wanted us to describe our company and what we do in 7 words or less and make it so he would be interested in knowing more. Embroidery was a hard one to sell to him. We'll have to work on it. Then he went over this outline thingy that would help us come up with a better business plan. And that was about it.

OB:
Brother Holt talked about what we will be looking forward to in the next coming weeks and how we will present out company ideas. Then he talked to us about the structure for our companies and what advantages/disadvantages leaders have.

We watched Remember the Titans clips to learn about the "Five stages of Group Creation":
1. Forming – High Morale, Low/Zero Productivity
2. Storming – Morale tanks, productivity goes up a bit
3. Norming – Morale up better but plateau, productivity still climbing
4. Performing - Productivity is up and Morale is up.
5. Adjourning - We didn't really go over this one. But I'm guessing it's all about finishing the project or team/group.

Some Definitions:
Norm = finding routine and accepted behaviors, “Social Loafing”,
Norms we want: Dedication, Common Interests, Joy, Friends, Trust, Respect, Punctual
Class seems to go quicker now. We'll see how long that lasts. that's about it for today.