As one might expect a couple of weeks before an election, the air is filled with the sound of pollsters. I don’t know about you but we get called almost every day (and night) to answer some poll about our voting intentions (absolutely), our choice of candidate (not you if you don’t stop calling), and our basic demography (I’m a 29-year-old woman with blond hair and a deep voice as far as they know).
Political polls aren’t the only kind you read about, and involve in your business, every day. TV ratings are polls, as are almost all media data. So it’s good to keep a few things in mind as you see the data. Continue reading
Tag Archives: planning
Dashboards
I’m fascinated by the obsession some folks have with dashboards. Not the kind you find when you climb behind the wheel of a car. Those are way too simple for some folks. Nope. I mean the business dashboards some folks stare at trying to make sense of what’s going on in their business. Some of them have graphs, dials, and, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to figure out if things were going as planned. Data or information? You just know they’re not the same. Continue reading
Filed under Consulting, Thinking Aloud
Staples
My wireless hot spot died yesterday – no flowers needed. I ran out to the local Staples to buy a replacement and that, coupled with an article I read this morning, got me thinking a few things which I’d like to share.
First, I hadn’t been to my local Staples in a bit. I usually get my supplies there but other than printer paper I don’t go through a lot since almost everything I do is digital. Staples seemed to be kind of a dinosaur in that regard. A lot of what is in the store is stuff that people (including me) used 30 years ago – file folders, paper, even pens – to do business. Much of it is fading away even in schools (certainly in college!). Continue reading
Filed under Consulting, Reality checks, Thinking Aloud
Consult Keith 