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 [email protected] 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.