Business | Geographical Perspectives

Banks are Destroying America’s Neighborhoods

I read an excellent piece this morning in the New York Times written by Greg Smith about why he was leaving Goldman Sachs. In short, he says it’s become too sleazy as short-term profit motives are now trumping all other considerations.

In the past 2.5 years I’ve been investing in real estate in my home town Pueblo, Colorado. What I’ve found is that large banks are dragging out the foreclosure process so that homes are left vacant for 18 months or more. This is bad for everyone.

It’s bad for the banks because while the homes sit vacant they deteriorate and lose value.
It’s bad for the neighborhood because it drives down prices and vacant homes invite criminal activity.
It’s bad for local government because the value decline results in lower revenue while additional criminal activity requires higher expenditures.
It’s bad for investors and prospective buyers because they have to spend more money on repairs.
It’s bad for renters because the reduced housing inventory decreases supply and drives up rental costs.

Geospatial MBA: a win-win for business schools and geography

I recently posed the following question to a group of geography academic types on LinkedIn:

Why don’t more Geography departments team up with Business Schools to offer joint MBA-MA degrees (or undergraduate double majors)?

It seems to me that this combination would be valuable to many businesses and would serve to promote the discipline of geography while pumping new life into once glorious but now in a bit of a decline MBA programs. For example, business schools would benefit tremendously from geographical analysis methods. There are real estate and finance faculty who have discovered the benefits of geography/GIS and are using it regularly (Susan Wachter at UPenn/Wharton comes to mind) but this seems to be despite the discipline of geography rather than due to encouragement from within.

As a geography person I’m clearly biased but I don’t see why geography shouldn’t be an integral part of a good business education

Geospatial Visualization in Business: Bringing John Snow into the Boardroom

John Snow was a physician in London in the 19th Century and he is famous for having used maps to identify the source of the Broad Street cholera outbreak in 1854. Dr. Snow’s work is often cited as the founding event in epidemiology. For me, it represents a key event in applied geography, demonstrating the power of maps and their ability to illuminate patterns in data.

643px-Snow-cholera-map-1 — Original map made by John Snow in 1854. Cholera cases are highlighted in black.

Here’s another map of the same data using modern cartography.

Just like the citizens of London who were trying to figure out what was causing the cholera outbreak, business analysts throughout the world are trying to diagnose pain points in their business.

Moneyball and the Automotive Aftermarket on AftermarketAnalytics.com

I recently made a post on the aftermarketanalytics.com blog on Moneyball & the Automotive Aftermarket. Please check it out and, as always, leave a comment and let me know what you think! Just to give you an idea of what the article is all about, here are the first couple paragraphs:

“I recently watched the movie Moneyball starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. It was a good movie and it made me think about parallels with the Automotive Aftermarket.

In Moneyball, a bold GM for the cash-strapped Oakland A’s begins using a flavor of analytics called Sabermetrics to identify undervalued baseball players who can help the team win without breaking the bank. Despite resistance from baseball’s old-school veterans, the approach is successful and the A’s overachieve by posting a winning season despite a payroll that is dwarfed in comparison to the New York Yankees and most of the rest of the league.

The use of analytics now seems to be firmly established as an important component in professional baseball management. Sabermetrics doesn’t replace the need for veterans of the game who can identify talent and the intangibles that make great baseball players and winning baseball teams, but it does add a critical and previously missing element to the business of baseball. I see the Automotive Aftermarket embarking on a similar journey in the coming years, although I’m not expecting Brad Pitt to star as the CEO of NAPA in a blockbuster movie anytime soon..”