Following Lewis: There are a couple of authors who I like to “follow.” By that I mean, I usually get any new book they publish. Michael Lewis is one of those authors. It all started with Moneyball, even though I’m a dyed-in-the-wool NON sports fan. And so The Undoing Project was a must on my reading list. As is almost …
How many times have you wondered how two different people looking at the same report managed to draw totally opposite conclusions? How many times have you looked at a set of data yourself and decided that the data must be wrong because it doesn’t show what you “know” to be true? Well, I suspect that you aren’t alone. I suspect …
“Back in the day,” I did an awful lot of spreadsheet work around forecasting. Sometimes, but not usually, I’d be asked for worst case and best case forecasts. Generally, though, any numbers I gave were reduced to only a single goal for revenue. It was vanishingly rare that someone in an executive position would present a revenue forecast that read …
I’m guilty as charged and I’m confident that you are too. The old saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” is backwards. We see what we believe. It’s the way our brains are wired and we have to work pretty hard to make sure we are really seeing what’s in the data. This topic came up again during a …
Finding the value of intangibles in business: In Part I of this review, I introduced the notion that in a past life, I had often had the discussion of “the financial risk of adding a salesperson” to a territory to grow revenue and market share. It seemed there were too many variables to consider and, being overwhelmed with possibilities, we …
Finding the value of intangibles in business: Many times throughout my career, I’ve been confronted with the difficulty of presenting a business case for one project or another to colleagues or management. I suspect many of you have had similar experiences. Perhaps the most frequent reason for failing to win the approval of “my project,” was that I had not …