Search Results for ‘"by the numbers"’
Seat-of-the-Pants Sports Management
| Peter Klein |
The WSJ recently ran a sort of anti-Moneyball piece on the NBA’s Denver Nuggets that belongs in our “by the numbers” series. Love the title: “Textbook Management? Hardly. — Assembled Largely by Instinct, the Denver Nuggets Keep Winning; Mastering a ‘Curious Business.’” Here’s the central passage:
[The Nuggets] don’t describe their success as the inevitable result of a carefully designed strategy. Rather, in an era when sports executives like to play themselves off as masters of mathematical analysis and risk management — and in a year when most NBA teams chose fiscal prudence over expensive superstars — the Nuggets are an anomaly. They owe their success to a bizarre combination of luck, good health, opportunism and a management strategy that is more six-shooter than Six Sigma.
The story caught my eye partly because it profiles Nuggest owner Stan Kroenke, a real estate developer who lives here in Columbia, Missouri and whose son Josh was Mizzou’s starting shooting guard from 2000 to 2003. (Stan’s wife also happens to be Ann Walton Kroenke, one of Sam Walton’s two nieces; it’s nice to have connections!)
3 comments 4 June 2009
Design by the Numbers
| Peter Klein |
A new item for our “by the numbers” series. Former Google lead designer Doug Bowman recently quit to take a position at Twitter, citing frustration with Google’s engineer-oriented, data-driven culture:
When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. . . .
I’ll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.
Adds Keith Sawyer:
Google’s engineer-dominated culture wants to see the numbers, the proof. Artists and designers don’t think that way — they know a design that works in their gut, somehow, when they see it. It’s a holistic phenomenon, and it emerges in some unpredictable way from hundreds of tiny design decisions about line widths and color shades. How, they would ask, could you possibly test every single combination, every possible design? . . . Numbers get you focused on the trees and you forget you’re inside of a forest.
I hold to the basic Misesian position that quantitative empirical analysis is a complement to, not a substitute for, other forms of knowledge acquisition such as a priori theorizing and Verstehen. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean I approve of fuzzy constructs in social-science research.
8 comments 13 May 2009
Cooking by the Numbers
| Peter Klein |
Management by the numbers is out; will cooking by the numbers be next? The WSJ reports:
[A]s people look for quicker and easier ways to make everyday meals, some are moving away from the rigidity of recipes and advocating improvisational cooking, where measurements are approximations and ingredients are interchangeable.
It’s common to distinguish between two personalities in the kitchen: the deliberate, systematic, careful personality, which tends to excel in baking, and the wilder, risk-taking, adjust-on-the-fly personality, which does better with other types of cooking. But the use of careful and precise measurements has been a staple of most kinds of home cooking for a hundred years:
The rise of recipes that use precise measurements is widely credited to Fannie Farmer, a student, and later, director of the Boston Cooking School, who published “The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook” in 1896. Until Ms. Farmer’s manual, cookbooks were written in prose, calling for a pinch of this or a handful of that.
“The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook,” which survives today as “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,” featured nearly 2,000 recipes that gave detailed instructions using a standardized system of measurement (teaspoon, cup, etc.). Ms. Farmer also included scientific explanations with her recipes, and wrote essays on housekeeping and cleaning. The rising middle-class and subsequent growth in the number of women looking to homemaking as a profession turned Ms. Farmer’s book into a hit — it has sold more than 4 million copies to date. (more…)
3 comments 2 April 2009
Management by the Really Big Numbers
| Peter Klein |
Management by the numbers may work after all. But what about management by the really big numbers?
Paul Slovic, writing in Foreign Policy about genocide, says we are ”numbed by numbers” — really big numbers, that is.
Why do good people ignore mass murder and genocide?
The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It’s not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human beings. In fact, the opposite is true. . . .
The psychological mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes in which mass murder is neglected involves what’s known as the “dance of affect and reason” in decision-making. Affect is our ability to sense immediately whether something is good or bad. But the problem of numbing arises when these positive and negative feelings combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. Psychologists have found that the statistics of mass murder or genocide — no matter how large the numbers — do not convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to trigger the affective emotion or feeling required to motivate action. In other words, we know that genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not “feel” that reality. In fact, not only do we fail to grasp the gravity of the statistics, but the numbers themselves may actually hinder the psychological processes required to prompt action.
Here is a longer version of Slovic’s piece, with references.
Are managers, likewise, unable to extract meaningful information from really big numbers? Is this a cost of centralized decision-making, or a limit to firm size or scope for a given degree of centralization? What would Harold say?
Add comment 26 March 2007
Management by the Numbers
| Peter Klein |
Many principles of “scientific management,” such as Harold Geneen’s concept of “management by the numbers,” are considered outdated, remnants of the Big Science era of the 1960s and early 1970s (the Cold War, the Apollo Project, conglomerates, etc.). Today’s management theorists and practitioners favor more holistic, less quantitative, and presumably more “dynamic” approaches. Organizations should be flexible, “lean and mean,” and focused on people and processes, not numbers.
The newest issue of Strategic Organization (4:4, November 2006) features a paper challenging this conventional wisdom. In “The Power of Numbers in Strategizing,” Jean-Louis Denis, Ann Langley, and Linda Rouleau defend the use of quantitative analysis.
This article draws on a detailed case study of a complex decision process in a public healthcare system to consider the role and potential power of numbers in strategizing. Because of their association with precision and accuracy, numbers may seem at first sight to be unlikely tools for decision making in contexts characterized by ambiguous goals and diffuse authority. Yet in the case described in this article, managers successfully mobilized a system of numbers to make an extremely controversial strategic decision. . . . Though contested, numbers can under certain conditions come to acquire and provide authority in organizations where power is diffuse. This is most likely when the number systems enable the reconciliation of diverse values and interests, when they are embedded in shared systems of meaning, and when they are coupled with and activated by particular micro-practices that support the legitimacy of their promoters as disinterested advocates for the collective good.
Despite references to “shared systems of meaning,” numbers as social constructs, power relations, “pluralism,” and the like — which might seem to warrant inclusion in our Pomo Periscope series — the paper provides a useful overview of the basic issues and some interesting case discussion.
NB: Watch out for some numbers.
2 comments 30 November 2006
What’s So Great About Tacit Knowledge?
| Peter Klein |
The knowledge management and capabilities literatures are in love — in love with tacit knowledge. Managing tacit knowledge, leveraging tacit knowledge, growing tacit knowledge — these are seen as the keys to achieving sustained competitive advantage. Economists, too, have gotten into the act, asking how incentive plans and the allocation of decision rights affects employees’ use of dispersed, specific knowledge. And, of course, F. A. Hayek’s analysis of socialism is built on the notion that centralized systems without markets and prices cannot make effective use of tacit knowledge.
But is tacit knowledge always “better” — more correct — than explicit knowledge? The knowledge management and capabilities literatures seem to take this for granted. And yet, a growing body of evidence on behavioral anomalies suggests that cognitive biases and heuristics can render individual judgments unreliable.
This came to my mind when reading Alex Tabarrok’s recent comments on the surprisingly primitive practice of medicine (here and here). (more…)
5 comments 26 October 2006
Another New Buzzword: Adjacencies
| Peter Klein |
From today's WSJ feature on Time-Warner we learn that "synergies" are out. Now it's all about "adjacencies."
In deal after deal, [Time-Warner] executives promised to create a well-oiled, "vertically integrated" profit machine. Books and magazines and music would feed television and movie and Internet empires, each strengthening the others. But this vision never panned out. . . . Now divisions are encouraged to cooperate only if they can't get a better deal on the open market. The company's units are expected to be "best in class" — corporate-speak for being an industry leader — and those that fall short are threatened with being sold.
A return to the 1960s and "management by the numbers"? (We do know, for instance, that the conglomerates weren't so bad after all – see this, this, and this.)
Who will write the first RBV paper on adjacencies?
Add comment 2 June 2006
