The official course description is rather uncreative in my opinion. I would add this to the description: This course is for you if you have ever wondered why McDonald’s sells Coke but not Pepsi and KFC sells Pepsi but not Coke, why Apple’s Think Different campaign worked so well, why Microsoft never got the amazing Courier project out to market (tears…), why IBM celebrates its history like this, why Woot was so happy to be acquired by Amazon it made this video, and why money is not everything for knowledge workers.

The links in the above paragraph are to videos I showed in class, which students really loved, and were much more exciting than someone lecturing bullet points and helped all of us stay awake early in the morning. The kind of description I have suggested above, is inspired by a description of a physiology course that said “This course is for you if you have ever wondered why you blush at the telling of a rude joke, why your grandfather must sit upright in order to sleep, why your grandmother finds your music annoying, why your boss no longer remembers your name, why infants are wrapped in blankets even on a warm day, why beans give you gas or why tea makes you pee.”

This means that my innovation in coming up with a description for the strategic management course was actually kind of a remix, but pretty much everything is a remix, which is also a wonderful set of videos I used for class…

The Internet

A major catalyst of the uprising was a man who set himself on fire. Pictures of this incident circulated around the internet and led to initial protests. Just like they did over the Iranian green movement, people are debating exactly to what extent the internet had a role to play. It’s interesting to see how much the internet can be effective in different countries using statistics on internet penetration rates, visualized on a world map here. Tunisia’s internet penetration rate is 8.2% which is not so high compared to most of Europe and North America (Canada & the US have a rate of almost 70%), but still relatively high for its region. In fact, Tunisia has the second highest internet penetration rate in the entire African continent. It’s rate is only slightly less than China’s and there are very few countries in Asia that beat it (Iran is one of them with 10.8%).

Education vs. Unemployment

One of the reasons mentioned by the media for the dissatisfaction of Tunisian people was the high unemployment rate, especially since Tunisians are becoming more educated. So I thought it would be interesting to look at employment rate vs. education rate in gapminder:

The graph shows that Tunisia has one of the lowest employment (highest unemployment) rates in the world which has not improved much in the past two decades despite increased levels of education. Actually, if you play the graph on the gapminder site, you will see that most of the world’s countries are becoming more educated but employment rates are not improving much. However, Tunisia’s unemployment problem is very severe comparatively. Only several countries in the region are doing worse.

Income Inequality

Another reason mentioned for Tunisian unrest, is income inequality (gap between rich and poor) despite growing national wealth. A gapminder analysis shows this to be largely untrue. While GDP per capita has been growing, income inequality has gradually decreased. Although the latest gapminder data is for the year 2000 (Gini coefficient = 0.41), the latest data we have from the CIA World Factbook indicates that the 2005 estimate for income inequality in Tunisia is still around the same level (Gini = 0.40), Ranking Tunisia the 62nd worst in the world among 134 countries, which is about mediocre.

Corruption

However, perhaps it is not so much the overall income inequality, as the corruption of a few government officials that angers the Tunisian people. Indeed corruption of the ruling family in Tunisia is highly cited as a major reason for the people’s discontent. According to the 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index provided by transparency.org Tunisia ranks 59th among 178 countries, with a corruption index of 4.3 (the higher this value, the cleaner, less corrupt a country is perceived to be). This value is mediocre, but compared to the Tunisia’s region it is actually pretty good. Few countries in Africa and Asia are better. Many European countries such as Russia (2.1), Italy (3.9), Ukraine (2.4), and Greece (3.5) are considered more corrupt than Tunisia. Still, it is possible that this corruption index does not take into account recent information revealed by Wikileaks that has fueled unrest in the country.

Press Freedom

One of the reasons for discontent in Tunisia is considered to be a lack of press freedom. Indeed, the government did its best to prevent coverage of the unrest as it was happening. A look at the Global Press Freedom Rankings from FreedomHouse.org shows that Tunisia’s record is horrible in this regard, ranking 186th in the world, near the complete bottom of the list, only one rank higher than Iran. (Side note: students in my class were surprised to find that Canada is not in the top few countries on this list, ranking 26th along with the UK, and the US is only slightly better at 24th).

Gender Inequality

Many Arab and middle-eastern countries are guilty of having high inequality between men and women. Canada, Austrialia and European countries are considered to be top ranking in terms of gender equality. From this UNDP website that visualizes data on the Human Development Indicators, we can see that Tunisia’s Gender Inequality Index (2008 data) is 0.481 (the lower the better). That is not too bad. In fact, it is only slightly worse than the United States (0.457), and better than most of Africa, Asia, and South America. I’m not sure if we could infer any link between gender inequality and general discontent of the public, but low gender inequality means that when there is discontent, women will be active in driving the protests, and that is a very important success factor for any movement.

Are you ready? Because I am
I didn’t think I would be, but you proved me wrong
And now with you beside me, I feel strong
We can move the world together
Let us start this brave endeavour
And let us love each other forever and ever and ever…

A poem for my love, Paria, for our engagement

They smell your breath,
lest you might have said I love you.
They smell your heart.
These are strange times, my darling.
The butchers are stationed at each
crossroads with bloody clubs and cleavers.

…Now suppose you have been able to take advantage of vulnerable people. It is possible that you may in time face accusations of irresponsibility from the public, journalists, NGOs, etc. Fortunately however, there are many clever ways to counter these accusations so as to not be blamed or held accountable…

…There are many ways in which blame can be averted. First, you can claim that whatever harm was caused, it was an accident that occurred randomly. If it couldn’t have been random you can argue that it was unintentional and unplanned. You can claim that you did not know that what you did would have those consequences or that you were somehow incapable of knowing. You can actually argue that you thought it would have very positive consequences rather than negative ones and it was hard to predict otherwise. If you did know the consequences you could argue that you were unable to prevent it or had no other choice or at least really did not desire it to happen. You can argue that you chose the lesser of two evils and if you had done something else, something worse would have happened. In the end, you could say what happened would have happened anyway, even if you hadn’t done what you did.

You can make a case that it is the fault of “the system” and you shouldn’t be singled out. An argument can be made that the harmful consequence was the result of a chain of events to which you or your organization may have contributed only little, and even that is ambiguous. All others responsible in that chain of events can probably claim the same thing and so ultimate responsibility will be diluted and no one takes the blame.  Everybody agrees that “we are all to blame” but in fact no one is really held accountable…

Of course the 5000 word limit was too little to be able to explain everything in detail. The contest organizers have sent out an email saying our chances of winning will increase if our excerpt page gets more traffic. So do click on the link!

In the business and management literature, we often speak of the soft side (Psychology and Sociology oriented) and the hard side (Economics oriented). So I tried to see how my mind map links to these two sides seen on the top left and bottom right corners in blue. I think the top right corner is leaning towards philosophy and the bottom left corner is inclined towards engineering and technology. So you could say my research interests lie at the intersection of the behavioural sciences, economics, philosophy, and technology.

But more particularly, I noticed that the general concept of decision making is a central theme that links a lot of my research interests together. This is good to know. I think it was a worthwhile exercise and helped me organize my thoughts and understand myself a little bit more. Now I have a better idea of which direction I might want to take my thesis work towards.

1. Watching the situation in Iran closely. I was never much into the politics of Iran but after the controversial 2009 presidential elections, it became impossible not to follow the news.

2. I’m in my fourth term now in the PhD program. I’m taking two interesting courses. One is a course on Business and Society (Corporate Social Responsibility, Stakeholder Theory, Business & Development, etc.) with Bryan Husted. Another is a course on Internet and Society taught by Barry Wellman (@barrywellman) at the University of Toronto. The course is formally titled “Social Aspects of Technology and Work” which makes it sound much more boring than it is. With these two courses I think I might end up minoring in sociology.

3. I’ve changed the title, theme, and header image of this blog. The title is a combination of Herbert Simon’s concept of “Bounded Rationality”, pointing out the cognitive limitations of humans, with Charles S. Peirce’s concept of “Musement” which is about freedom of thought and imagination. The header image is a portion of Raphael’s School of Athens painting, a poster of which is currently hanging on my wall. I’ve also merged all my Persian language blogs into one.

4. I’ve updated the working papers page. It’s now more like an “ideas in progress” page or a list of research areas I’m working on. I’ve also updated the publications page to include all my conference papers so far. The one that won the best student paper award last year is now available online.

5. I’ve translated some TED talks into Persian (Farsi). There are now many TED Talks available in Persian and our Facebook group of Persian TED Translators is growing continuously.

6. I’m now working on occasional assignments with the Network for Business Sustainability to develop practitioner-friendly summaries of scholarly articles called Research Insights like this one.

It was late night and most of the passengers on the bus were sleepy. One girl who was sitting on a single seat had trouble finding a place to rest her head. That was when her friend kneeled down on his knees next to her seat so that the girl could rest her head on his shoulder. The lover boy remained in that uncomfortable position for nearly 20 minutes while the lucky girl slept comfortably in his arms.

My friend and former student Khadijeh, now lives in New York and is enjoying new opportunities for education. She has written about this in an essay that recently won first place in an essay contest. I am proud of her and congratulate her for this achievement. This is her essay:

Participating in the Educational Opportunity Center has made my future brighter. Education is a huge benefit not only for my family and me, but also for other people. With education, I can help my children with their schoolwork. With education, I can complete my humanity.

First of all, I can say that the EOC has become the apex of my life. I am very happy that I have the opportunity to study and continue my education here in the United States. I have been an enthusiastic student since I was a first grader. I was very good at studying my lessons and was able to learn them quickly. Unfortunately, I could not continue and finish school because of the situation in Afghanistan. I traveled to several other countries including Iran, but the Iranian officials did not give me the opportunity to continue my education because foreign people are not allowed to attend school.

Unlike Iran, my participation in the EOC makes my future brighter because eventually my dreams can become a reality. What’s more, with education I feel I am very productive. Everything in the EOC is organized in a manner that fits how I learn. My self-esteem has improved because I am learning new things every day. Furthermore, because of these new skills, I am sure I am going to be a successful person because of the help and support my compassionate, patient, professional, and expert teachers at the EOC. After I finish my education, I plan to be a nurse of pharmacist and can be of assistance to other people.

Furthermore, participating in the EOC has benefited my family. With education, I can help my children with their homework, and I can participate fully in parent/teacher meetings. When my children see how easily I can help them with their schoolwork, they are proud of their mother. They do not need to ask other people for help. Therefore, they experience higher self-esteem. They can also study better and obtain more success in their own lives. I have a friend who is uneducated and could not go to school when she was a child. Her father was very strict. He did not like the girls to study. He thought study was only for boys. My friend is now married to a man who has the same idea as her father. As a result, she never found the opportunity to learn how to read and write. She has great difficulty herself and with her children’ schoolwork. Most of the time, she asks my daughter to help with her children’s homework and asks me to go with her to any school meetings. Whenever I see her and her problems, I have become more aware of the value of education and grateful for the EOC.

Finally, I believe that with education, I will be a better and more complete person with a better sense of humor and an awakened consciousness. With education, my understanding of nuances and my empathy will increase. Therefore, I can understand others and their problems. When I can identify the problems, I will be able to help all people better.

In conclusion, I believe that participating in the Educational Opportunity Center means a lot to me and my future. Continuing my education is the most important thing in my life. By participating in the EOC, I can make my future brighter, and I can help myself and others.

I wasn’t the first blogger to start complaining about Yaari.com, and certainly wasn’t the last. You can find evidence that the blogosphere is getting  increasingly fed up with Yaari here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. One of the most prominent bloggers to complain about Yaari is Arun Gupta who ironically has the same last name as Yaari’s founder Prena. His post on the Yaari scam which creatively labels it “Spam 2.0″ is the second link that shows up on a google search for “Yaari.com”! Another creative label is “Social Spamworking”. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeremy Wagstaff has also warned about Yaari.com and has done some impressive background search on it’s founders.

From the comments on my post, you can see that people have tired many ways to fight Yaari.com. Some people tried writing emails to Yaari.com which predictably, did not result in any behavior change on Yaari’s part. I never even bothered to email them. And I feel absolutely no regrets when Prena Gupta, Yaari’s founder emailed me on February 14, 2009 and said “I would have greatly appreciated if you could have contacted me directly and spoken to me about your grievances, so that we could have used your input to improve our process.” Many other people did Prena, and you did not improve your process.

Prena Gupta has apparently sent similar emails to some of the bloggers that wrote in criticism of Yaari, asking them to remove her partner’s contact information, and trying to half-apologize but in such an arrogant manner that it seems actually rude. Allan Herman writes extensively on the letter he recieved from Prena and his response. Aalaap Ghag who has writtern this about Yaari, has had a much shorter response. Prena’s efforts may have been more than just emails since her name appears among the commentators on my post, but I have doubts whether that is really her.

What is important is that Prena Gupta has finally realized that these honest blog posts are really hurting her company, herself and her partner Parag who should be especially worried for the sake of his reputation as a university professor. But I think Prena is doing way too little, way too late. Negative word on Yaari.com is spreading fast, and is too out of control to be contained with these ill-informed, arrogant sounding, semi-apology emails (read the full text of her emails here).

Yaari.com had it coming. You cannot simultaneously be a scam and be high profile, and live through it in one piece. Some research shows that people who hate your product tell 11 people; people who like your product tell three people. One report found that after a negative experience with a company or organization: 80% of US adults decided to never go back to that company; 74% registered a complaint or told others; 47% swore and/or shouted; 29% have had a headache, felt their chest tighten and/or cried; 13% posted a negative online review or blog entry. In addition, after a negative customer experience, 34% have fantasised about emailing friends, family or colleagues asking them to boycott the company or organization. 12% have dreamed of picketing and/or defacing a company/organization’s headquarters.