Decision-making is hard. So hard that we pay people handsomely to be professional decision makers: Doctors Underwriters Bank Managers Tax Inspectors All of them make their living by taking complex ill-defined situations and making decisions. Unfortunately they don’t always decide the same way If you put two professional decision makers in a room at the […]
Can You Have Too Much Information?
We live in a world of big data. We are all collecting information, compiling it and then trying to work out how to use it to our best advantage. So of course we want to see all the information available and then some, before a decision is made. The more information we have the happier […]
How to Estimate, and Why you Really Should Know
Speed will gain you competitive advantage Speed in business is gained by making decisions quickly Decisions are delayed because we need information to inform those decisions So anything that can give us numbers quickly is a source of competitive advantage Being able to do a quick estimate is a very valuable thing So how do […]
Measure Anything the Sesame Street Way
There are a lot of intangible things in life, things that affect the service that you are delivering and the business that you are running. Things that you would love to know, but are frankly just impossible to find out. How about these for a couple of examples: How effective are your managers? How […]
Are you Asking the Right Questions?
Google have been playing around with their data. They have found out that they can predict the likelihood of a flu outbreak in a particular geographical area. They do this by counting how many times people search for “flu” in that location. It seems that if a friend or relative goes down with a bad […]