Fyre Festival – and how to engage your students
Welcome back to Talking Accounting. I hope you all had a great Christmas, New Year and summer break (for those reading this in the southern hemisphere). Australia copped a bit of a beating from the heat over January, and in an attempt to avoid the unseasonally warm temperatures in Sydney over the past few weeks, I took the opportunity to avail myself of a bit of Netflix binge watching.
Whilst I’m not necessarily proud of everything I watched (the “Great Wall” anyone?), I also recently watched one of the two recently released documentaries on the catastrophe which was the “Fyre Festival”
Fyre Festival
For those who haven’t heard of the Fyre Festival, you should definitely look it up. I won’t be able to do it justice here, but check out the trailer for the documentary “FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” to give you a sense of it. As a case for Business Schools, it is absolutely amazing. It covers everything from marketing, to logistics, event management, leadership (or lack thereof), financial fraud, budgetary issues including cash flow management. Literally you could build a course on it.
Focusing on the accounting side of things, and here I’m quoting from the SEC complaint against the founder of Fyre Media, Billy McFarland:
“From at least 2013 through 2017, McFarland – both directly and through Fyre Media and Magnises – fraudulently induced over 100 investors to invest more than $27.4 million in Fyre Media and Magnises … McFarland engaged in a host of deceptive and fraudulent acts in furtherance of the offering scheme, including: (i) making material misrepresentations and omissions to investors about the financial strength of each of the three companies, (ii) creating documents that fraudulently inflated key financial metrics, including revenue and income …”
The discussion points raised from what occurred in this case are many and varied, and is something which would likely appeal to students we have coming through our classes now (especially given half of them are probably on Instagram in the middle of class anyway…).
Teaching Point
The broader teaching point here is not necessarily to use this particular case, although it is a good one. Rather, being aware of what is happening in the world around us and bringing that into class will help to engage our students. If you’re doing this already, that’s awesome. Any good academic worth their salt will do this.
But a twist to that, is to find links and cases to events which relate to a student’s lived experience. The students are getting younger every year, and things which are relevant to us may not be something that grabs their attention. This isn’t to say that older cases aren’t relevant or informative, but you may get greater cut through with more recent, “cooler” case studies.
This does mean keeping abreast of what youth culture is about – but it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to partake of it. I mean Mumble Rap (the music kids listen to nowadays….)?