Thanks to Eric Ries and the organizers for Lean Startup Week for allowing me to share video of my 15-minute talk from last year's event.
One reason for sharing this today is to celebrate yesterday's initial release of the in-progress version of my book Measures of Success. If you buy the book now, you'll get a PDF of the first three chapters, or about 40% of the book's expected content.
As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings.
Two Data Points Are Not a Trend
The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.
Last week, I saw a headline about a drop in NCAA college football attendance.
I wasn't satisfied with the two data point comparisons or other written descriptions of the metrics. I wanted to see data. SHOW ME THE DATA, JERRY! (with apologies to "Jerry Maguire"). I wanted to see a chart. So, I found the data on to NCAA website and created "process behavior charts" that tell you much more about the data than text numbers ever could.
If you watched this year’s World Series, you saw a lot of home runs. There were many dramatic home runs in late innings or extra innings. It might have seemed like a significantly high number. My friend Dan Markovitz asked…
So many of our business metrics are reported in terms of two-data point comparisons. How much did the metric change from last week? Web site traffic is up 14% from last month. So that’s good? Maybe. Two data points…
Here’s another post on the theme of performance metrics, as I’m talking about next week at Lean Startup Week (see yesterday’s post or others in this series). At the risk of becoming a broken record, it saddens me to see…
As Eric wrote about in The Lean Startup (and as many others say), time is the most precious commodity anybody has. I think that's true in startups and it's true in other organizations. Everybody says they don't have enough time. So, we have to use it wisely.
A returning guest today for episode #280 is John Dyer, president of his consulting firm, JD&A, Inc., and a contributor for IndustryWeek.com. Today, our focus is the famed "Red Bead Experiment." We'll talk about it, he'll share memories of Dr. Deming facilitating this, and we'll both share and discuss our reflections and our experiences with this, and the lessons learned.
If you don't care about sports or statistical process analysis, this isn't the post for you... but it was interesting for me to try to wrap my head around the data behind a headline ("Blazers player secures $500,000 bonus by not taking 3-pointer in final game of the season") that I'll write about here in this post.
My favorite book, as I've written about before, is not a "Lean book" -- it's Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler, PhD. It might look like a book about statistics...
OK, so it’s not the kind of scientific research that involves lab coats and microscopes, but I’m doing some research that I’d like your help with. I’m looking to do some research and some interviews for writing projects related to…
Two pet peeves of mine are hearing people say things like “Lean is all about reducing waste” and or “Lean is all about cost cutting” (and thankfully others are also trying to dispel that myth). Another pet peeve is people…