Business Expo Quotes

In our high-tech world today, there are unlimited ways with which you can search for people, places, and events to connect you with like-minded people. Food enthusiasts? There are local cooking classes. Gardening fans? There are flower shows and garden expos. Kids in school? Join the PTA and get involved. There are clubs and groups for almost any interest these days and venturing out to make those connections is a powerful way to expand your insights, your network, and even your business.

I’d be hard-pressed to find a better start to a brand story than the one that chronicles the birth of “the people’s car,” the Tata Nano. The story goes that Ratan Tata, chairman of the well-respected Tata Group, was travelling along in the pouring rain behind a family who was precariously perched on a scooter weaving in and out of traffic on the slick wet roads of Bangalore. Tata thought that surely this was a problem he and his company could solve. He wanted to bring safe, affordable transport to the poor—to design, build, and sell a family car that could replace the scooter for a price that was less than $2,500. It was a business idea born from a high ideal and coming from a man with a track record in the industry, someone with the capability to innovate, design, and produce a high-quality product. People were captivated by the idea of what would be the world’s cheapest car. The media and the world watched to see how delivering on this seemingly impossible promise might pan out. Ratan Tata did deliver on his promise when he unveiled the Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo in 2009, six years after having the idea. The hype around the new “people’s car” and the media attention it received meant that any mistakes were very public (several production challenges and safety problems were reported along the way). And while the general public seemed to be behind the idea of a new and fun Indian-led innovation, the number of Facebook likes (almost 4 million to date) didn’t convert to actual sales. It seemed that while Tata Motors was telling a story about affordability and innovating with frugal engineering (perhaps “lean engineering” might have worked better for them), the story prospective customers were hearing was one about a car that was cheap. The positioning of the car was at odds with the buying public’s perception of it. In a country where a car is an aspirational purchase, the Nano became symbolic of the car to buy if you couldn’t afford anything else. Since its launch in 2009, just over 200,000 Nanos have sold. The factory has the capacity to produce 21,000 cars a month. It turns out that the modest numbers of people buying the Nano are not the scooter drivers but middle-class Indians who are looking for a second car, or a car for their parents or children. The car that was billed as a “game changer” hasn’t lived up to the hype in the hearts of the people who were expected to line up and buy it in the tens of thousands. Despite winning design and innovation awards, the Nano’s reputation amongst consumers—and the story they have come to believe—has been the thing that’s held it back.

A nice industry of crisis management firms has joined the fray by producing reports that identify 'threats' to business, including activist groups. In this industry built upon fear, corporations pay firms to identify threats to their profits, which leads to more campaigns to address these threats, which leads to more reports, and on it goes. The financial motivation to identify threats results in some interesting reports. For instance, the Society of Toxicology paid a private firm, Information Network Associates, to create a threat analysis in preparation for the group's annual meeting, ToxExpo. One section of the report profiled Seattle activists, including what schools they attended and whom they were dating.

In the end, the Expos needed a champion, someone with money and power who could run the team through the harsh 1990s, then reap the benefits in the next decade when an explosion in national and local TV deals and a vastly expanded revenue-sharing program made even the poorest teams prosperous and relatively secure. No one ever showed up. That, more than anything, is why baseball didn't work in Montreal. In the league's eyes, Montreal had failed baseball. The cold, hard truth was that for the most part, this was absolutely right.

Baseball was Expos' play-by-play man Dave Van Horne's livelihood, and he had to press on. He got back to work when play resumed, though he did stage a kind of silent protest. Van Horne carefully wrote the names of the entire 25-man roster on a little index card, then placed that card in his wallet, where it would sit through the harsh winter that followed the '94 disaster, into 1995 and onward. Ask him about it today and Van Horne will pull out that card, read through the names, and flash a sad smile. Twenty years after baseball sabotaged the best team in Expos history, he remembers what might have been. That card-that incredible roll call-will sit in his pocket for as long as he lives, a reminder of a dream destroyed.

I was unaware that Adam had been trying to stand between me and Sabrina since ever, and the expos gave him room and time to mingle with her, and talk about me, just before I met Martina. Adam and I knew that we would most likely get the place we wanted, and only we knew that we were going to make it happen - I was going to make it happen - we both knew. I was unaware whether Adam had been manipulating Sabrina throughout the last weeks and months of our so-called “relationship” until I acted out of character one night and broke a security door with my shoulder the following morning, when her behaviour was becoming too much for me to endure. I didn't think that she had any potential relation to business or criminal activity on Adam's part against my own life. I was wondering if Adam didn't want me to reconnect with Sabrina because he had other plans with her. If we reconnected with my little sweetheart of a crazy ex-girlfriend, then Adam's manipulation of both of us wouldn't work. Adam had been manipulating both me and Sabrina for a long time, I just didn't realize it since we had split up and she moved out. Adam couldn't really manipulate Sabrina before because she hated them. But Adam had an easy job manipulating / corrupting / influencing / instructing / transforming / changing / destroying Martina apparently and I didn't understand why. Was it because of Ruan? Did Adam promise jobs for Ruan, Agustina in London, Amsterdam, and Paris? That sounds like manipulation. Of children. “Manipulation.” – Mani = hands “Mani” – hands / money “Manipulation” – Money – pull – ation Pulling the hands. The lines. The cash. The strings. The puppets. I told her I wanted her to move back home for her safety. We had been living there for over half a year, and Adam, Sabrina, and the others didn't know where we lived. Was it only an illusion and only for me personally, to think that they did not know our address? If they didn't know where we had moved, why had we moved to Mount Juic, the Jew Mountain? By chance? If they knew our address from Martina, then what was the point, or what were they waiting for? For the construction to be completed. Why would they want me to think that they did not know our address? To let my guards down.

Felipe Alou once told me a story that crystallized the state of Expos baseball, and of Olympic Stadium, in the late '90s. "I have a friend from the Dominican Republic who's a team owner there," said Alou. "My friend is a very successful man in business and baseball, a very rich man. One year he came to Montreal to talk with me and to see the Expos' operations. He came with some friends from the Dominican Republic and stayed at the hotel downtown, the Queen Elizabeth. He told me that he went around the city to see if he could buy an Expos hat. He couldn't find a store downtown that would sell him one. Then, he and his two friends took a taxi to go to Olympic Stadium. When they arrived, the driver knew where Olympic Stadium was, but didn't know where the entrance was. "He told me that for the one week he was in town, he never saw one person with an Expos hat. The day he went to see a game the first time, we had 12,000 fans. He told me those 12,000 fans had to be the best fans in the world. When he arrived at the stadium-let's say we were playing the Cincinnati Reds-he and his friends got out of the taxi and walked around the stadium, and there were no signs anywhere that said, 'Tonight, the Expos play Cincinnati.' How could they even get 12,000 fans, he wanted to know, if he couldn't find a hat, he doesn't see a store downtown that sells hats, and when he comes to the ballpark, you can't find the door, and there are no signs advertising the game? My friend said, 'No wonder they don't have any fans here!