So today and tomorrow I decided to attend an event called Northern Voice which is kind of like a blogging conference in Canada I guess you can say. It’s always great to get to meet new people. The event is being held at the University of British Columbia this year and today it was mostly about meeting others I guess you can say as people talked about topics and got to know each other little better. This was the name tag that was given to me at the event:

From the looks of it today, I wasn’t able to find any other business and financial bloggers so I might be a rare breed it seems for this conference. I did in fact meet some great people and will post more about everything later since the actual conference takes place tomorrow. The puzzle moment of the day for me and some other people was that there was a person wearing a t-shirt on his head for the whole day it seemed. You can see it here:

Your guess is as good as mines. Should be fun tomorrow.

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Today while looking at my credit card account I noticed that my credit limit for my personal Mastercard was automatically increased. While I would normally see it increase by a conservative amount from time to time, for some reason it jumped drastically by $2500 which makes my limit for this card $8200 and I can’t think of anything that I did to initiate that.

The only other time I saw this particular card increase a lot at once was back at around the Christmas shopping time in 2005 where in one day I bought over $3000 worth of gifts. A couple of days later I figured that I might as well just pay off the balance early so that I didn’t have to deal with it during the New Years time. To my surprise, upon checking my balance I noticed that my credit limit for the card had been increased by another $1800. At first I didn’t know why, but when you think about it I guess it made sense in that case as it was still early in the Christmas shopping time and I guess with me purchasing that much the card issuer was anticipating that I would spend even more and so they gave me more credit to spend.

A more devious explanation that some people have told me was how certain credit card issuers want to give certain people a higher credit limit in hopes that they don’t pay them off immediately and therefore the company can make a lot of money off the interest rates. Fortunately, I am the complete opposite of that and it makes you wonder if that is true where the intent is to try and get people like myself to overspend and mismanagement our bill payments as a lot of young adults around my age do tend to use a credit card as a way to borrow money and can’t fully pay it off every month.

I guess in my case the higher credit limit is a plus as it won’t affect my habit in regards to the way I use a credit card and having more flexibility is good.

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The other day I was with a friend who is an impulse buyer I guess you can say as if something looks like a bargain he will buy it. On top of that, he is a fanatic when it comes to certain things which means he reads reviews and opinion about movies, TV shows, games and so fourth. Because of that, similarly if he sees something like say a show he has never seen but heard good things about it he will buy it as well.

Everyone has a hobby and so that is pretty typical, but the thing that astounds me all the time is how so many of the items that he has bought are still in their original shrink wrap and packaging as he never even opened it. The common answer is that he has no time and he consistently does this. By the time he even opens the product it has reached to a point where the price for the item has dropped drastically. The funny thing is that he knows that it is a bad habit yet he keeps doing it.

In my opinion, this is a common example of those little things that you do that add up in terms of why so many people at the end of the day express how they need more money just to survive whereas a change in your habits can do a lot more in the long run.

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With the 2008 Olympic Games being held in Beijing, the local news here showed an interesting report on how so many people and companies in China use what they call “Chinglish” which is basically words that have been translated from Chinese to English that are incredibly broken grammatically or that it hasn’t been translated properly. Take a look at these examples:

In the report they show even more examples such as calling what we would normally refer to as an ATM machine people have somehow translated it into English as a “Help oneself terminating machine.” I thought that it was so odd that I decided to post the clip here so that everyone else can see it.

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This episode sure shows how this season’s candidates seem to have so many personality clashes and how so many people are oblivious in regards to their own performances. Either that or the video editors are doing a great job in only showing clips to portray a certain view of the candidates and events that is.

The challenge for the two teams was to go into a mall and attempt to get as many people as possible to sign up for a contest that was sponsored by Priceline where they were giving away free vacation packages. The team who had the most sign ups would win. The project manager for Team Arrow was Surya and Aimee remained the project manager for Team Kinetic. The common theme for both teams it seemed was that the project managers were not viewed highly or respected very much by the majority of the team members that they were leading. There was a humorous moment on Team Arrow’s side where Frank began to draw a mock up expression of Surya’s face on a napkin to show how over serious his personality is and passed it along to the other team members who laughed at it. This was the clip:

When the two teams began to execute their plan for team Arrow’s side it looked like Surya was not very productive in terms of helping the team as everyone else looked very proactive in getting things done. Team Kinetic had a large hurdle that they did not plan for where over fifty percent of the mall shoppers were Hispanic and the language barrier was a huge impact in regards to how fast they could get people to sign up let alone trying to explain to people on what the contest was about. The end result was that Team Arrow generated 359 sign ups while Team Kinetic generated 326 sign ups. The interesting moment before this was that Trump asked Team Kinetic on how they felt about Aimee’s leadership and no one said anything.

In the boardroom Aimee brought with her Derek and Jenn as the blame game topic was how over fifty percent of the mall crowd were Hispanic which was vital information that Aimee was not told. The other two fought back by saying how it should have been a common sense thing as she was in the mall while they were touring it and it should have been pretty obvious. The team’s resentment from Aimee’s performance last week did seem to come up a few times as well which played a factor. In the end, Trump decided to fire Aimee as he felt she didn’t have the leadership quality yet as so many of her team members seem to have felt the same.

The parts in this episode that stood out for me was how you see this in real life all the time whenever you are dealing with a large group of people or employees where it can be difficult to get them to tell you immediately on what they truly feel in regards to how they feel about a person who is overlooking/managing them. This is especially true as demonstrated here where if you ask them that question in-front of the person in charge they would rather not say anything for fear of creating some bad friction. Similarly, when a team does good it is often assumed by many that the person leading them was highly respected amongst their peers which I have seen not to be the case so many times as well. Often people’s opinions get ignored in these circumstances as well if they do decide to voice their opinion as a lot of people would assume that it can’t be that bad if they won and that this one person is just whining.

I guess this is why so many companies use a third party service to try and get a true feel on its talent pool’s morality and opinions when it comes to work and the people in charge. Speaking from personal experience, I‘ve seen companies literally lose tens of thousands of dollars due to losing valuable talent or sales revenue as a result of insisting to keep leaders/managers who consistently demonstrate that they can’t motivate a team of people. A lot of times I think it is due to pride where if you say placed a certain person in charge over another and the end result was that it made everything worse it is hard for many to just admit it as it can be a very embarrassing thing for many. If there was anything to take away from this episode I think it would definitely be to keep your eyes open in finding ways to truly get the real story on how people feel when it comes to working in a certain group or company.

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