The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success by Bob Sullivan & Hugh Thompson

Author:Bob Sullivan & Hugh Thompson [Sullivan, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

Data Idolatry

The use of data to break through plateaus might be seen as a continuum. If you’ve used no data, you should start immediately. If you’ve adopted data, you should seriously question its accuracy. But even if you believe your metrics are sound and true, yet another trap lies ahead: data idolatry.

We live in a time when there is incredible bias toward data. Companies create goals for employees and force them to say that they are “35 percent complete” halfway through the year, which usually indicates no progress has been made. Cost cutters measure the price of office space per square foot and ignore the effects of longer commutes on performance that result from consolidating offices. Put simply, for many firms, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. That’s Moneyball taken too far. Sales managers have known for years that the occasional free football ticket or pricey steak dinner is key to closing big sales. But which steak dinner got the signature on the check? No one knows. But everyone knows that if there’s no steak dinner, there’s no sale. How do you measure good will? Trust? Loyalty? These qualities are the backbone of any successful venture, but they have taken a severe hit during a time when many seem to hold measurement above all else. This is foolish, especially when data itself is often the problem. As you’ve no doubt heard many times, there’s lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics.

What matters most, your best-selling product during the past month or your best-selling product during the past year? Who really has the most-watched show on television, the program with the most family sets turned on, the show with the most adults age twenty-five to fifty-four, or the show whose viewers have the highest per capita income? It all depends on what story you are trying to tell. Data can go very bad, very quickly if you don’t watch it carefully. And in the hands of manipulative people, it can be used for pure evil.

One data crisis arises from something called conformance metrics, which simply means that companies tend to measure the exact same things that other companies measure because that is the only thing their tools are built to do. It’s a bit like a game of copycat and a bit like anchoring. For years, websites published the number of “hits” they received, some bragging they’d been “hit” a billion times in a month. Ultimately, advertisers soured on this measurement because it had many flaws, like this one: Hits could represent the same person refreshing the same page over and over again. Next, unique visitors became the standard, with the thought that advertisers really wanted to get their material in front of as many people as possible. So all sites started bragging about visitors and doing all they could to amass as many visitors as possible. “But wait!” advertisers said soon. “Throwing ads at random millions isn’t really that effective. We don’t care how many millions of readers you have.

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