Follow the Motivation, Not the Money

Detectives and journalists are often told that if they want to find out what’s going on to follow the money. When you’re chasing clever people, that’s probably a good idea. But when the things people do seem to be counter-intuitive, illogical, inefficient and sometimes just plain stupid, sometimes you have to look somewhere else to find out what’s happening. Especially if you want to stop it from happening.
And the place to look is often the motivation. Not what people do, but why they do it. And often you find that, while the outcome was very strange, the person who made the key decision did what he or she did for a very logical reason. The problem comes when the wrong person with the wrong motivation makes the decision.
A small example:
I bought some books from Amazon the other day. Three kids’ books, for $10 each. They came from an Amazon affiliate, with free shipping to a US address. Fair enough. I have a post box in Point Roberts, three kilometres from my home. However, when I went to collect them, they had been shipped in three separate packages! So instead of $3.50 box fee, I had to pay $10.50 That was still a third of the cost to have them shipped the extra 3 kilometres across the border, but enough to make me ask (in less polite language, I must admit) “What the f$&%?
I’m sure it cost the seller nearly three times the price to ship the books separately, so why would they do it that way? I can only guess, but I’d bet there was someone in the chain of procedure whose motivation was to move those books as quckly as possible. Even more likely, there was someone getting paid by the package.
Which leads us to the second story. A friend of mine was on a temp job working for a mailing service. They were on a contract with a local university, stuffing envelopes with transcripts that were being sent out.
After a few hours, my friend noticed that she was getting a lot of duplicates. Several transcripts from the same person were being addressed to the same institution. After a day of this, she went to her boss and told him. Between the two of them, they developed a system where they set aside any duplicates and sent them all in the same envelope, thus saving somebody a bunch of stamps, at least.
There is the question of how such a duplication might occur, but we don’t have enough information to help the huge bureaucracy of a university with their efficiency. But just looking at the mailing service, we can make some interesting speculations about why the problem wasn’t fixed. We have to ask ourselves, would the mailing service owner trot up to the university and tell them about the problem, to receive a pat on the head, and an assurance that they would use his company again?
I doubt it. In the first place, he’s probably working on a set contract that he bid for. In the second place, he’s making money off the problem. He bid for the contract on the basis that one transcript equals one stamp, which he has to cover. If he can keep both sender and receiver happy and send five transcripts under one stamp, why should he go around killing golden geese?
So the university will continue to spam out multiple transcripts, and the shipper will continue to pocket his take, and my friend has finished her temp job with a good story to tell, and that will be that. Unless someone in that university reads this blog, of course. Wouldn’t it be nice to be useful?

 

Prince George School Sales

Here’s an example where there was considerably more money involved. The Prince George School District was in such bad budget trouble a few years ago that they closed quite a few schools. One way to address the budget overrun was to sell off the properties, some of which were on prime development land.
Now you might think that this situation would bring out the best in everyone, especially price-wise. Not the case. It was a great surprise to the few who noticed when one of the properties, 5 or 6 acres of river-view land with a large still-viable building on it, went on sale for a ridiculously low price. $100,000 below expected asking. A particularly observant entrepreneur was even more surprised to find,, on the day and hour the listing came on the market, when he showed up with his money in his hand, that the property was already sold.
Smelling a rat, he checked into it. The first problem had nothing to do with bureaucracy. It was straight criminality. A less morally upright real estate agent, finding out by the insider grapevine about the steal, had jumped the gun and stolen it. Which is not allowed.
However, the publicity allowed more knowledgeable sorts to ask about the reduced price. This is what had happened. The usual real estate dealer is motivated to sell at a high price, because he or she gets a percentage. That’s how it usually works. However, some bright. Light high in the School District decided for some reason to instead turn the job over to a sales agent who was getting paid a flat rate for ever sale. So instead of being motivated to get a good price, the agent was motivated to make a quick sale. Hence the bargain basement price.
It’s all very simple when you know how people are motivated. I can’t also help but wonder, looking at this huge gaffe, whether that sort of decision making wasn’t the reason the School District was having budget problems.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.