The Alanis Business Academy Podcast: Business Education for Everyone Else | Matthew Alanis

Part of being a successful entrepreneur is learning to identify opportunities. Whether it's a pain that we feel personally, or one that affects others, all successful businesses satisfy an unmet need or want. In today's episode I welcome Bryan Feil, Executive Director of Neighborhood Industries, a Fresno nonprofit committed to economic development. Listen in as Bryan and I sit down for a one-on-one interview in front of a live audience. We talk about the opportunity that Bryan saw for Neighborhood Industries, successes, and of course...setbacks.  What did you think of today's show? Starting this fall, we launched the Entrepreneur Speaker Series, where I invite entrepreneurs and other business professionals on campus to talk with our students about their experiences in entrepreneurship.  If you're interested in getting the opportunity to listen in on these interviews please let me know either by emailing me at matt@alanisbusinessacademy.com or Facebook and Twitter. At the end of the show (43:14) I mention a new video guide that I'm launching on October 6. If you're interested in learning how to create your own instructional or tutorial videos, then you'll definitely want to check this out. I'll walk you through how I create videos for Alanis Business Academy, from start to finish. Learn how to plan, record, edit, and produce your videos, as well as what hardware and software to use in the process. To learn more, go to: alanisbusinessacademy.com/tutorialvideoguide.  To subscribe to The Alanis Business Academy Podcast, go to: alanisbusinessacademy.com/itunes. As always, thank you very much for listening and supporting this podcast. 

Do our initial investments doom us to continuing supporting bad decisions? Learn about the power that sunk costs, or costs that have already been incurred and thus can't be recovered, and how sunk costs influence our decisions. Specifically, we'll talk about the effect that draft order in the NBA has on the playing time and survival of basketball players. 

How do overpriced entrees help restaurant sales, even when they don't sell? Why does The Wall Street Journal charge the same for its print-only and print-and Internet subscriptions? Learn why consumers have trouble evaluating products in absolute terms and what businesses do to help. 

Why do athletes pursue individual performance over teamwork? Why are physicians willing to incur Type I errors over Type II errors? And why do financial incentives fail to build long-lasting commitment? Learn about the power of incentives, and why we reward one behavior, but secretly hope for another. 

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), we access Facebook about 14 times per day. Why has Facebook become such a prominent part of our lives? And can B.F. Skinner's "Skinner Box" experiments explain our infatuation and addiction to social media? In this episode from Alanis Business Academy, learn about the fixed and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement and how they just might be the cause of our love of social media, email, and even gambling.   

The fall semester is scheduled to resume in about six weeks, so what better time to gear up for eighteen weeks of...boredom? Is boredom in academics simply an unavoidable consequence? And is it really the result of dispassionate, mis-incentivized college professors? Or is it something else?  

What does former first-round draft pick Greg Oden have to do with the sunk cost fallacy? Do decisions related to playing time and survival in the NBA have more to do with draft position than on-the-court performance? And why does our initial investment of time, effort, and money affect our decisions?

If you were told the words "do your best," what would happen? Would your performance improve? If so, by how much? Or would their be any improvement at all? The conventional wisdom is that "do your best" is a quick an easy method of increasing effort and ultimately performance. But does telling someone to do their best really impact performance? And if it doesn't, what does? 

Profit is a key metric when evaluating business performance. But does focusing solely on profit pose a risk to the long-term success of a business? And if profits aren't the answer, what is? 

Unlike a few corrupt individuals, a majority of society's members can easily act in an ethical manner. Or can they? So what factors affect our moral reasoning? And why is being ethical more difficult than you think? To answer these questions we explore the stages of moral development.

This is the final episode of a three part series about the external environment. If you haven't done so already, you may want to check out episodes 7 and 8, which include a discussion of the general business and specific business environments respectively. You can find these episodes on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, and alanisbusinessacademy.com. Now that you know about the general and specific business environments, it's time to learn what businesses can do about external environments. How do managers identify and evaluate opportunities and threats to their business? Managers can engage in several behaviors to help better understand the environments that they operate within. In this episode learn about these steps so that you, too, can accurately evaluate the external environment. 

This episode is the second of a three part series about the external environment. If you haven't done so already, you may want to check out Episode 7: Evaluating the External Environment, Part 1. You can find this episode on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, and alanisbusinessacademy.com. As we discussed in our last episode, the general environment includes those factors that indirectly affect all businesses. These factors include the economy, as well as technological, sociocultural, and political and legal trends. So do factors exist that perhaps affect one business and not another? To answer that question we look to the second area of external environments: the specific environment. 

The environments that businesses operate in today are filled with uncertainty. Despite this, managers still attempt to anticipate changes in their environments so they can adapt accordingly. But where do managers look to identify these changes? To answer that question, we'll explore the general business environment. 

The term bureaucracy certainly has a negative connotation in today's society. But is bureacracy really all that bad? To answer that question, we explore German sociologist Max Weber's early management theory Bureaucratic Management. 

What is good management? We look beyond the textbook definitions and discuss Henri Fayol's 14 Principles of Management. 

Over 100 years ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor highlighted what he believed to be the biggest threat to society: national efficiency. Why was national efficiency such a concern? And how can we improve the efficiency of our organizations? 

Have you ever wondered what your manager actually does? It may be more than you think. 

How does a manager's position in the organization affect their responsibilities? We look to answer that question, as well as highlight some of the different types of managers seen in today's organizations. 

What is management? In our first episode we dive into the function of management and discuss the four common functions of managers.