Marriage Is Good For Your Heart (and other Valentine’s Day Statistics)
Listen to yesterday's Prairie Home Companion song on romantic statistics: scroll down to "Statistics" after clicking here. Happy Valentine's Day, readers. Bill
What Corporate CEOs Need To Know About Big Data
Steve Levitt, author of Freakonomics, gave a presentation on big data in corporations. It should be watched by all CEOs and wanna-be CEOs. It's discouraging in that it shows many companies' unwillingness to use the …
The Trial and Error Economy
For years I have been writing about the Trial and Error Economy. Now there's a great TED talk on the subject by Tim Harford: To read my articles on the subject, scroll down on …
Starbucks Strategy: Time and Motion Studies Now
Starbucks is trying to help its staff members be more efficient. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, they are using old fashioned time and motion studies. A barista makes a latte, while someone …
Advertising and Quantitative Analysis: The Trial and Error Economy Comes to Madison Avenue
The New York Times has an article about quantitative analysis coming to the advertising industry. In the old days, ad agencies labored for months to create the perfect ad–perfect being totally subjective. They only had …
Financial Regulation: Paulson Misses the Trial and Error Economy
This new regulatory proposal from Treasury Secretary Paulson reminds me of the Patriot Act. The department has a laundry list of changes it wants. Then there’s a crisis. At which point the department pulls out …
Incentive Systems: Markets, Medicare, and Your Business
"Markets and Medicare" is a great article in today’s Wall Street Journal by my good friend John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis. The article has value beyond the Medicare debate, but …
Nike Strategy: The Trial and Error Economy
Nike has implemented a major change in strategy, according to an interesting article in Forbes Magazine. The company had previously advertised with a mass market focus. Its "swoosh" logo was everywhere, as was it’s great …
Starbucks Strategy vs. McDonald’s: 10 Possible Competitive Responses
I’ve used Starbucks business strategy as a way to discuss the Trial and Error Economy (here and here). I’m not, by any means, the world’s greatest expert on the company, but it provides a great …
Starbucks Strategy: Trial and Error at the Beginning
Starbucks began with a willingness to experiment, according to Taylor Clark’s new book, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture. The book begins with a story from when the company had only …
Firefox Gets the Trial and Error Economy
The folks at Mozilla who put out the Firefox browser (which is great) understand the Trial and Error economy. They recently wrote up a description of an experiment they did in marketing their download web …
eBay’s Culture of Analytics: We All Need to Get on Board
Fast Company’s latest article about eBay describes how the new chief technology officer created a "culture of analytics." The old approach had been to set up a new feature or interface and see if it …