Weekend Digest: Mike Tyson Does Broadway And Business Lessons From The London Olympics
by June 22, 2012 11:24 pm 128 views
For our weekend business readers:
MIKE TYSON ON BROADWAY
After a successful run in Las Vegas, the former heavyweight champ is bringing his one-man show “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth” to Broadway, says The Wall Street Journal.
“I'm just naked and very vulnerable, and telling you who I am, and where I'm from. How this happened, and how I lost all this damn money, and how I had all these children and I go to prison and … you know. You know what happened, guys.”
The show will be directed by Spike Lee.
Tyson tells The Journal he'd become fascinated with the idea of doing a one-man show after seeing actor Chazz Palminteri do the same in “A Bronx Tale.”
“This is what me and my wife wanted,” Tyson said. “This is what we decided to do after I gave up using drugs and being a pig and stuff.”
Read more gritty quotes from the 45-year-old ex-fighter here.
SHARED-VALUE PRICING SYSTEM USED FOR TICKETS TO LONDON OLYMPIC GAMES
The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games is July 27 and if you're attending and were lucky enough to get a ticket, or a ticket to any of the venues, you were part of a unique and cutting-edge pricing plan developed by the organizing committee.
An essay in Harvard Business Review explains how the committee's share-value approach to pricing tickets is more socially-conscious than a more traditional style.
The committee organizing the London 2012 Olympic Games faced an extraordinary business challenge: how to price 8 million tickets in a way that allows equitable access to 26 sporting events, meets revenue and attendance targets, and adheres to the explicit social objective of making the Olympiad “Everybody's Games.”
As one committee member put it, “Tickets account for 20% of the Games' revenue but when done wrong result in 80% of an organizer's headaches.”
The solution was to value customers more than their money. First, the committee increased the number of pricing tiers for many sports, which kept some ticket prices low while still hitting revenue targets. Second, it offered a pay-your-age pricing plan for young customers and discounted tickets to those over 60.
The Harvard Business Review story details many other innovative ideas the London committee used to make buying tickets for the games “more humanizing” as well as more profitable. FYI, the company printing the tickets for the London Olympics is none other than the reclusive Fort Smith-based Weldon Williams Lick.
“OPERATION TWIST” EXTENDED BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE
With employment numbers down and the euro crisis, the Fed has said it would purchase $267 billion of long-term bonds by the end of the year, paid for from the proceeds of sales of short-term bonds in its portfolio.
It's called “Operation Twist” and is designed to bring long-term interest rates down in hopes of stimulating demand.
The move extends a program announced last autumn and due to expire this month, under which the Fed swapped $400 billion of short-term bonds for long-term ones. Like its p
redecessors, this latest round of monetary easing was motivated by clear evidence the economy would not live up to the Fed's forecast.
Operation Twist is set to expire after the presidential campaigns. “At that point, the Fed can act without being accused of helping one candidate or another. If the economy really appears to be heading over the fiscal cliff, the Fed will not want to worsen the impact by holding back a monetary cushion.”
What are the risks and could we see the Federal Reserve eventually roll-out another round of bond buying? The Economist details the full story here.
LITTLE ROCK'S “QUIET GIANT” OF THE DATA-MARKETING INDUSTRY
According to the New York Times, “Few consumers have ever heard of Little Rock based Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more.”
Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.
And it's all legal.
Go inside The Times story to read what changes one member of the Federal Trade Commission would like implemented for public disclosure of “data brokers” and learn how Acxiom has recruited talent from top companies to “develop even more advanced techniques to mine and refine data that peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S.”
SUPERMARKET CHAIN CLOSING IN ON WAL-MART IN BRAZIL
It's called Cencosud and with the acquisition of five Brazilian supermarket chains in five years, billionaire Horst Paulmann is “closing the gap on Wal-Mart and other rivals in the region’s biggest economy.”
A Bloomberg post talks about Paulmann's life and his modest beginnings and shares how he was able to buy his latest supermarket chain for less than what Wal-Mart was going to pay.
Now the German-born entrepreneur, who has overseen a fourfold jump in Cencosud’s shares since its public offering in 2004, is looking to raise more than $1 billion to reduce debt and continue his expansion in Latin America.
He’s the most-active deal maker in Latin American retail, data compiled by Bloomberg shows.
Paulmann has been meeting with investors in the U.S., Europe and Asia this month, touting his ability to navigate a global slowdown and deliver earnings growth from a company cobbled together from at least 16 acquisitions in the past decade. Paulmann’s road trip is part of a plan to sell as many as 243 million shares in a primary offering that would be worth 678 billion pesos ($1.4 billion) at its closing price on June 19.
With an estimated net worth of more than $5 billion, go inside the Bloomberg story to learn more about this supermarket mogul's empire and his future acquisition plans.