Bob Pozen on Personal Productivity
Posted by Mike S in Productivity on May 26th, 2011
Harvard Business Review printed this series of blog posts from Bob Pozen in its May issue, which focused on productivity.
He manages to touch on topics that are relevant to most every knowledge worker, including PowerPoint and business travel, but here is one of the better excerpts:
I’ve seen many executives realize what they wanted to say only after they had written a lengthy draft. That’s unfortunate. You should know where you will end up before start.
Try this: After composing an outline, write the concluding paragraph. That will tell you whether you really know where your article or memo is going.
- Will It Be Cheerios or Life This Morning?
- How to Be a Speed Reader
- How to Be a Speed Writer
- What Not to Spend Your Time On
- Make Meetings Work: Fight the PowerPoint
- Business Travel With Eyeshades and Flashlights
- It’s Not the Time You Spend but the Result You Produce
The Joy of Stats, and some less joyous stats
Posted by Mike S in Miscellany, Reading, Visualization on December 30th, 2010
Hans Rosling’s The Joy of Stats is now available in its entirety on YouTube, via FlowingData:
You may recognize Rosling from his 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes video, which has gotten a lot of press - on the Internet, at least.
This dovetails nicely with the classic How to Lie with Statistics, which I just read over Christmas. It re-sharpened my eye towards deceptive visual representations, and not a day after finishing it did I see some intellectually dishonest charts on The Heritage Foundation’s Top Ten Charts of 2010. Their #1 is pretty egregious - see if you can guess why:
“BI has hit the wall”
Posted by Mike S in Business Intelligence on September 28th, 2010
I Am the Orson Welles of PowerPoint
Posted by Mike S in Presentation on September 17th, 2010
From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
I believe that sometimes a PowerPoint demands five consecutive pages of full bleed abstract images. Just to make people feel. To get mid-level managers to loosen their ties and take off their name card necklaces. Too much logic is the death knell of any PowerPoint pursuit.
Two excellent posts about *just* data versus actual analysis
Posted by Mike S in Business Intelligence, Presentation, Reporting on August 9th, 2010
I’ve had these bookmarked for a while and periodically revisit them. They are worth checking out.
Juice Analytics: Filling the gap between reporting and Reporting
Avinash Kaushik: Consultants, Analysts: Present Impactful Analysis, Insightful Reports
Commenting out an entire Load or Select statement
Rather than using double slashes (//) on all lines of a Load or Select statement or opening and closing comments (/* */) before and after, typing rem comments the script until it reaches a semicolon.
For instance:
SalesFact:
LOAD Date,
CustID,
Amount,
Quantity
FROM Sales.qvd (qvd);
…becomes…
rem SalesFact:
LOAD Date,
CustID,
Amount,
Quantity
FROM Sales.qvd (qvd);
03/31/10: SAP achieves awareness.
Posted by Mike S in Business Objects on March 31st, 2010
04/01/10: The end of life as we know it.
(Cue Terminator theme.)
This was the page that loaded when I logged into the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center (formerly BusinessObjects Labs) today.
Axis Group is hiring experienced QlikView consultants
Posted by Mike S in Announcements, QlikView on March 23rd, 2010
QlikView Consultant (Berkeley Heights, NJ/Atlanta, GA)
We are also hiring for entry-level positions and summer internships, so please pass this along to bright, young people you know who are pursuing IT-related degrees and might have an interest in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing.
We are hiring for other positions, as well, related to different verticals and software partners. Here is the full list.
Again, please pass this along to anybody who you think may be interested, and feel free to contact me with any questions. Thanks.
Edward Tufte on NPR’s On The Media
Posted by Mike S in Miscellany on March 21st, 2010
Minister of Information (follow link to embed of audio)
Edward Tufte is perhaps the country’s foremost evangelist for the clean, clear and rich presentation of complex information. The Obama administration’s stimulus package is flooding the economy with 787 billion dollars for employment and public works projects. Put the two together, as Obama did earlier this month when he nominated Tufte for the stimulus advisory board with the hopes that the public will have a fighting chance of understanding where the stimulus money went and what it’s doing.
Bar charts vs. line charts
Posted by Mike S in Visualization on February 22nd, 2010
It may be difficult to attribute the following points to a specific source, but here are all of the guidelines I can remember off the top of my head about bar charts vs. line charts, mostly learned from Edward Tufte and Stephen Few. It’s a bit of an art, and how you represent your data depends on what exactly you are intending to find in it, so it’s difficult to write finite rules that dictate what to do. If you want to learn more, check out their books on our Reading page.
Line
- When to use them: Line charts should be used only for time series (chronological) or when there is some other sequence to the dimensions on the x-axis, e.g. dates, months, sequence of stages of a project, sequence of meters along on a gas pipeline, and they should be used to detect trends and patterns, not to give people exact quantitative readings.
- Scale: As line charts are not really intended to give people exact numbers, forcing zero scaling is not necessary and can make it considerably more difficult to detect said trends and patterns.
Bar
- When to use them: Bar charts should be used for comparing specific x-axis values, though they can certainly be used for time series, like line charts. They can also be used to display parts of a whole in favor of pie charts, in which case, the space between the bars should be reduced.
- Orientation: Do not use vertical or diagonal text to label the axis of a bar chart. If the x-axis has longer text descriptions, use horizontal bar chart, so the text can read left-to-right, horizontally (the way we normally read).
- Scale: As the area of bars implies volume, it can be deceptive to use dynamic scaling with bar charts (see: Lie Factor). If the differences between the data points is difficult to distinguish with forced-zero scaling, use symbols/points in favor of bars and use dynamic scaling.
Applies to both
- Dimension order: There should be some logical order to the dimensions on the x-axis. In the case of a line chart, it should follow the chronological, process, or stage order that caused you to select a line chart in the first place. In the case of bar charts, the order should have some rhyme and reason to it: sorted by y-axis value, alphabetical, etc., depending on the content of the chart and what its intended use is, e.g. ranking, distribution.
- Scale labels: If the numbers are already being displayed on the data points, it is redundant to label the axis with numbers, too.
- Axis labels: If you can incorporate the metric names and dimension names into the chart title or legend, do not waste space on axis labels.
