Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Her family rotated through Rio
The call
The call came out of nowhere while Dia Bondi was home with a new baby, wondering how she would work with a tiny person in her life. A note online said she had been recommended for an international project: working with the bidding committee that had to stand before the International Olympic Committee and make the case for why Rio de Janeiro should host the 2016 Games. She wrote a scope of work and showed up under her own brand.
Relatives in rotation
The project ran across three engagements and a couple of months in Rio, where she rented a small apart-hotel. Her husband flew down with their son and her mother-in-law, and after a couple of weeks he flew home. The mother-in-law's sister took the next shift, and then her mother and an aunt after that.
The bid team
The bid mixed experts who each came in with a different lens, Australians who had helped host the Sydney Games, a US-based production team, an in-country bidding committee, business leaders writing checks, and local government and security agencies. Her job was to make each presenter successful, which meant telling them often that they had an ugly baby, in the first five minutes with people who didn't know her and were twice her age. It was the hardest project she had ever done from a power-dynamics standpoint, and it came with a lot of tears.
How is an Olympic host city actually chosen?
Members of the International Olympic Committee vote in a secret ballot at a session held years before the Games. Rio de Janeiro was chosen on October 2, 2009, in Copenhagen, over Chicago, Madrid, and Tokyo. After earlier rounds removed the other cities, Rio beat Madrid in the final round, 66 votes to 32. The win made Rio the first South American city to host the Summer Games.
Why do bid teams bring in outside consultants?
Bidding for the Olympics happens once per city, so no local team has done it before. Cities often turn to people who have taken part in earlier bids or hosted earlier Games, and Sydney, which hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics, was a common source of that experience. Production companies, communications specialists, and security planners join the local committee for the same reason. The result is a team assembled from several countries and professions around one short presentation.
Why do people defend their own work so fiercely?
Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely described the IKEA effect in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Across several experiments, people who assembled furniture or folded origami themselves valued the result more than people who had not made it. The attachment grew with effort, even when the product was plain. A presenter who has rehearsed a pitch for weeks has put in the same kind of effort.
More from Curiosity with Kristen
