Archive for the ‘Corporate Culture’ Category

From: CMO To: All Staff Re: Changes in internal data analysis and reporting Consistent with current efforts to streamline our operations, management team has decided to change the way the company analyses and communicates business data. Recent assessments made clear that we are using just a small fraction of

(…) On the top of the mountain was a plain. There stood an old stone house, and in front of the house lay a great fish-pond, but behind it was a dark forest. He saw neither men nor animals, everything was quiet; only the wind rustled among the trees, and

You are in the middle of a presentation and your worst nightmare suddenly comes true: your boss yawns, and for the right reasons too: your presentation is dull, your charts are dull dull dull and you are boring your audience to tears. The solution? High impact charts

Stephen Few left a comment in my post “Is Data Visualization Useful? You’ll Have to Prove it“. We all have much to learn with Steve, so instead of leaving the discussion buried in an old post, I thought it would be interesting to make it more visible.

Are Excel charts, and Excel in general, a commodity, with no competitive advantage? Only if you want it to. Why? Because a vast majority of users: Have the data analysis skills of a toddler (or less); Can’t go beyond chart defaults; Functions? They know how to click

Most managers don’t care about a better visualization of business data. As a reader puts it: Short of locking management in a room with Tufte and Few, how do I sell management on the value of seeing things differently? Instead of trying to sell, let’s see why

In a recent article for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, writes: “The banking industry that emerged from that collapse [the Great Depression] was tightly regulated, far less colorful than it had been before the Depression, and far

Can a picture of a nude person improve your decision-making processes? (Please don’t say “yeaaaaah”.) Probably not, but if you need a good attention grabber a picture of a naked b0dy is your best bet. Make sure you’ll add one to your next sales report. Because, if

According to Stephen Few, the founders of Tableau Software made some assumptions about visual analytics’ adoption that we can summarize in a single sentence: analysts want to find hidden insights in large and complex data sets using new visual paradigms. Later on, they discovered that these assumptions