About ten years ago I collaborated with Mark Peck (currently president/CEO of ApexxGroup, LLC) on visual representation of customer buying behavior analysis. At the time we thought we were pretty clever since we were able to make effective use of bubble charts to compare changes in customer retention, defection and overall value at a decile-by-decile basis. Our clients loved the work since it reduced large tables of mind-numbing numbers to simple graphics that focused attention on the critical patterns. On limitation of our charts is that they only compared two years of data so it was difficult to show changes over longer periods of time.
Today Mark shared this TED video. It’s a few years old but the interactive nature of these relatively standard bubble charts makes for a powerful presentation. Rosling used software created by his affiliate gapminder.org. Though we didn’t have that ten years ago, it now occurs to me that we could have simply used a PowerPoint slide presentation to accomplish a similar effect.
In addition to the great graphics, Rosling is both entertaining and thought provoking. Your thoughts?
Source: TED: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen, Feb, 2006
I was first on the list at the local library for the new book The Numerati so I decided to take it on a business trip last week. I started reading on my first flight and by the time I reached my layover airport, I decided to buy the book at an airport bookstore. Of course, I paid full price but at least I could start writing in the margins!
I’ve started a mind map of some of the key concepts. It is interactive in the frame above or click on the map to collaborate and add your own information at Mind Meister. Just create a free account. Or, for less than $50 you can create a premium account which will allow you to create an unlimited amount of shared maps. This seems like a neat opportunity to try a relatively new form of collaboration. Tell me what you think in the comments.
Ian Ayres, author of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart has an interesting post at the Freakonomics blog. In response to Tiger’s dramatic win at the U.S. Open, Ayres wonders why we don’t see more probability analysis of sinking a put from certain distances by certain players. We seem to be obsessed with statistical minutia in other sports but golf is relatively untouched. Granted there may be a few more variables in putting such as the cut of the green, location of the ball, direction of role, etc. but it would be fun to make some predictions. Better yet, how about a hypothesis or two?
For instance and for my own game…
Do I have a better shot at sinking a mid-range put than a short put because I feel I have less at stake so I relax more on the longer put?
Does the number of stokes taken to get to the green have a bearing on the probability of making certains puts? Do I relax more when I’ve already blown the hole versus when I have a shot at an eagle?
What’s the relationship between warm up time on the practice green to puts made on the real greens?
Guest poster, Justin Wolfers, said a few words recently on the Freakonmics blog about prediction markets at Google. I found the linked Googleblog post, “Putting crowd wisdom to work” quite interesting as it described how Google was “walking their own mission talk”…
At Google, we’re constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world’s information, including information relevant to our business.
This article describes how Google uses prediction markets to forcast product launch dates and other important strategic events. What struck me about the more recent Freakonomics post, however, is that the question changed:
So we decided to move beyond asking, “Do prediction markets work?” and instead use them as a tool for better understanding how information flows within a (very cool) corporation. Information is terrific to theorize about, but hard to measure. That’s where the prediction market is useful: if you and I trade similarly on a market, then we can infer that you share similar information.
Yes! It’s all in the asking the right questions. How often have we improved our understanding of a system or event, just by asking the questions from a different perspective?
I enjoyed Tom Davenport’s (author of Competing on Analytics) recent predictions on prediction markets in his Next Big Thing blog at Harvard Business Press.
Predictably, he asks if prediction markets are “the next big thing.” (Ok, enough with the prediction puns.)
Here are his observations regarding culture and markets:
For a company culture to value prediction markets, its culture would need to have certain (rare) attributes:
Confidence that executives have valuable roles to play even if they don’t always have the right answer;
A high level of trust in the intelligence and capabilities of employees;
The willingness to follow numbers and analysis wherever they lead (as long as they are more-or-less consistent with common sense);
A pretty strong analytical and financial orientation (since futures markets aren’t something that every Joe or Jane understands).
If you catch his post, be sure to check out the discussion that follows.
In the latest round of tech acquisitions and mergers, IBM snatches Cognos. According this BusinessWeek article, this is a combination that might actually work. I think all of these big player acquisitions are creating havoc in large companies that have tried to standardize on enterprise solution providers. For instance, my company is clearly an IBM shop. No Oracle spoken there, but we’re a big user of Siebel and PeopleSoft. Oops, those are now Oracle products. Does that mean that there will be advantages in the future for Oracle users? I’m certainly no expert in the arena of enterprise software but it appears to me that the end of best-of-breed certainly has some downsides.
I bumped into Ian Ayres’ personal web-site last night. He is author of Super Crunchers. The prediction tools page includes a few free, fun tools some of which are mentioned in the book. One that I especially liked is the tool to predict how long you’ll live. Two tools are included one of which is from my employer, Northwestern Mutual. Give it a shot. The results may surprise you! Click here to “Play the Longevity Game”.
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