Book Post 4

The next reading in my book The Wisdom of Psychopaths written by Kevin Dutton was a little bit more boring than the recent ones, but Dutton did provide more connections between business and being a psychopath, which is something that continues to interest me.

My stance on the book has not been altered due to this reading. I believe that Dutton makes some really interesting points connecting psychopaths to the business world, but I believe a lot of details and stories that Dutton adds are unneeded. They do not help further Dutton’s argument and sidetrack the reader from the connections he is making. In this section, this exactly what Dutton did.

The reading started off very well. The first few pages built up a strong connection between the traits of strong business leaders with those of psychopaths. Dutton showed a chart that showed the traits of a leader compared side by side with the traits of a psychopath and the results were shocking. With different wording, most of the traits were seen on both sides of the chart.  Dutton went on to discuss the perfect mix of traits. Clearly psychopaths are psychopaths and businessmen are businessmen for a reason. They can’t easily switch from one lifestyle to another, but businessmen can be functional psychopaths according to Dutton. If you take away the poor decision-making and put a person in the right environment, having the emotionless, persuasive and impulsive abilities of a psychopath can put you in front of the pack in the business world. After Dutton explained this, he digressed into a story about how society has become less dangerous and then a story about his friend Andy and their encounter with a psychopath.

Overall, the connections that Dutton made this week were similar but he shined new light on the idea of a functional psychopath and how they could fit into society. The book continues to show times of excitement but overall doesn’t spend all its time on furthering the argument.

Class Post 4

The first week back from break is always less productive than most other weeks of school. Everyone is fresh off two weeks of relaxation and there is no real drive for productivity. Additionally, with two weeks off it takes a couple of days to get operations back to running full speed. We spent most of this week just tidying up details and getting reorganized in both the two hundred dollar and storefront project. 

For the two hundred dollar project, since it is after the New Year our prime time of higher need for calendars has expired. People have bought the calendars they plan on using for 2015, so for the most part our calendars would just be extra. Even as we approached the New Year, it was clear to see our calendars weren’t selling at the rate we expected. Coming back in 2015, we realized that we needed a price cut to make the calendars seem more appealing and to hopefully increase the rate of selling them. We broke profit before the winter break so we aren’t as concerned with making money as we are with simply selling the rest of the calendars. We are continuing to sell the calendars and have class blocks along with lunch blocks set aside to sell them in the upcoming week.

For the storefront project, we really focused on the fine-tuning and details this week during class. We had completed all of the hard work before break, and had to focus on putting it together into a nice organized packet for the bank. We wrote an overview and combined parts one through six to make up the packet. After reading it through for errors and adding flow to the packet, we sent it off to Mr. Gladstone at Citizens bank for him to review. Overall, it was a good first week back and we hope to build on it in the final two weeks of these projects.

Book Post 3

            The next section in my book called The Wisdom of Psychopaths written by Kevin Dutton was much more exciting then last weeks reading. Dutton finally began to draw a connection between the traits of psychopaths and success in the business world.

            Dutton started this section of the reading talking about the power that psychopaths have that allows them to make switch emotions effortlessly. Dutton discussed the different traits a psychopath can reveal in a matter of seconds. He discussed the surface of charm that covers the ruthless quest for vengeance and a psychopath’s ability to speak softly and carry a big stick. Psychopathic traits are needed in the risk takers of society. A lot of this is similar to what was discussed earlier but is still interesting.

            A new piece that Dutton incorporated into this section was a personal story. Dutton talked about his childhood friend who was a psychopath and told many stories showing this kid Jonny always being able to manipulate people to get his way. After telling stories of Jonny manipulating teachers, parents and other kids into doing things for him, Dutton moved on to talk about how Jonny ended up working for M15, the British equivalent of the FBI. With Jonny’s psychopathic traits, including power of persuasion and charm, he was able to use these traits to his advantage and find a job in an elite service group.

            Dutton closed the reading starting to form a connection with business. Dutton explains how psychopathic traits give you the upper hand in business, especially in position where your status give you power and there is a chance for material gain. The organizational chaos found at these jobs fuels the thrill seeking, manipulating and power abusing traits of the psychopaths. Overall, Dutton is making the book more interesting and I am excited to see what he does next.

Class Post 3

            This week was eventful to say the least. We really turned our focus to selling the calendars this and tried to break even by the end of the week. To make the money that we invested back, we needed to sell 36 calendars. As of this point, we have sold 33. Even though we didn’t make it to our goal, we still had a very productive week selling calendars and hope that our success continues in the last two days of school before winter break.

            Our path to selling a third of our calendars in a week wasn’t necessarily smooth but we did get the word out about our calendars. At the beginning of the week our goal was to create “buzz” about our calendars. We brainstormed for most of Monday until a bold idea for advertising came to us. We used pictures of an attractive man and women on two individual posters to advertise our calendars. Some members of the faculty thought that our posters were inappropriate and objectifying women. This was not our intention with the posters and we did apologize but they did create the buzz we were looking for. The calendars were being talked about and many more were bought after our poor advertising decision.

            For the storefront project we finished up our blue prints and learned in detail about the permit process. The storefront project has taken a back seat to the calendars for us because the calendars time on the market will expire with a new year. When we return from break, our focus will shift more to the storefront project. Overall it was a productive week and we hope to continue with our success into the break.

Book post 2

            In this weeks reading of the Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton, Dutton continued to unravel the making of a psychopath. He continued to discuss the emotions that fill regular people and how psychopaths simply don’t feel them. He discusses how being psychopathic is an emotionless void and psychopaths can even see emotions more as numbers and words than feelings. Dutton also began to discuss how psychopathic traits are passed down through generations. Dutton puts psychopaths on a spectrum and states the varying degrees on this spectrum, with anyone from mass-murdering rapists to politicians on the spectrum. A lot of the book so far has been analysis of psychopaths and I am beginning to become bored of it. It is very repetitive, talking about the same ideas for the first eighty pages. It seems as if most of the ideas he has discussed so far could have been summed up into ten pages. Dutton hasn’t even really made the connection between the business world and being a psychopath and I am already eighty pages in.

Dutton isn’t saying that people should be psychopaths but he feels that the everyday person in the business world might be able to learn a thing or two from them. Dutton has yet to dive into how success in business is related to psychopaths, but based on his observations so far; it will be interesting to see how he connects them. When (if) Dutton connects the business world and being psychopathic, I think it will surround the emotions of the people. I think what Dutton has keyed in on so far is that the emotionless void that psychopaths have is what puts them above the average person.

Class Post 2

This week during Communications for Entrepreneurs, my team and I didn’t have a breakthrough week with ideas but nonetheless it was a productive week. The two hundred dollar project was put on hold in anticipation of the calendars arriving. On Thursday we came back to it to put together the posters for advertising the calendars. During class on Thursday, we distributed these posters across the school to get the word out that the calendars had arrived. The posters made the price, theme and where to purchase the calendars very clear to anyone reading them. The calendars came on Friday morning and we started selling them during school on Friday. We not only used the posters to advertise, but we all made our snap chat story a picture of the calendars. We also organized an announcement to be made about the calendars for the coming week.

The rest of the week during class we focused on the storefront project. We moved on to parts four through six and began to think about the financial aspect of the storefront. We calculated we would be making $1700 a month for the Foam Home. We also created a blue print of the space that is available to us. This will allow us to visualize and create the environment we are looking for virtually before taking it to the next level. We are in debate as a group on where certain things will go and will finalize our blue print by the end of the coming week. We want to make it as similar to a home environment as possible for kids who are coming to study, and using a blue print allows us to figure out how we can create that environment. Overall, the Foam Home is coming along nicely and I am excited to keep working on it.

Class Post 1

During the first week of December, my group and I had a very successful week. The weeks before when working with Jacob, CJ, Ben and Yiorgos, we were struggling to find ideas for both our two hundred dollar project and the storefront project. However, this week we had breakthroughs in both projects. For the two hundred dollar project, we decided to plan our project around the holidays. With the new year approaching quickly, we thought a useful product that people need in preparation for the new year is a calendar. We took this idea and thought of how we could make our idea unique. We ended up deciding to make the calendars BHS athletic calendars so we could sell them to the BHS community before everyone is out for winter break. We made rapid progress with this project, collecting all the pictures and ordering the calendars by the end of the week. I believe that this idea had a lot of potential for success. I think our timing is perfect with the new year coming up and that the calendars will allow us to make a huge profit while also providing a useful product to the BHS community. The storefront project also took off this week. After examining the space we have to work with last week and seeing what service is needed in the area, we determined we wanted to make a work-friendly cafe for students in the area. There are other coffee shops in the area, but none that give the environment we are trying to provide. We want to give students a place to enjoy their favorite drink while also getting work done in a comfortable environment. With BHS, Mammonidies, old and new Lincoln in the area, we believe there is a strong market for the Foam Home. We worked on parts one through three this week for the storefront and hope to have even more success with these two projects in the coming weeks.