Like sports fans who love to evaluate various team decisions and outcomes, a friend loves to analyze other businesses: how they fare against their competition, what they appear to be doing right or wrong, what their margins might be — not in a schadenfreude-y way, but out of genuine interest. (He loves the game of business.)
Which makes the upcoming Paris Olympics of particular interest, especially since an Oxford study published in Environment and Planning found that the 30 Summer and Winter Games held between 1960 and 2016 ran over budget by an average of 172 percent.
Yep: 172 percent. (If you’re keeping score, the 1976 Montreal Games ran 720 percent over budget and it took 30 years to pay off the debt issued to build facilities; deficits from the 2004 Athens Games had a follow-on effect that helped cripple the Greek economy.)
