Drinking from the Fire Hose

It's a basic tenet in business that you can't manage what you do not measure. This is why the best data to work with when managing a company or a project are those that are measureable: sales figures, costs, marketing leads, and so on. And from the standpoint of data-driven management, there's probably no better time to be in business than today, with any number of solutions available for data warehousing and analytics.

Yet this can be a double-edged sword: sometimes, our ability to accumulate and manipulate data outpaces our capacity to make sense of it all. Who hasn't come face to face with information and not know where to even begin? Who hasn't felt weighed down by the constant stream of reports to peruse and study? Who hasn't been overwhelmed with data overload?

Anyone who can relate to this situation will welcome Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions without Drowning in Information, a new book from Christopher J. Frank and Paul Magnone.

What Frank and Magnone offer in Drinking from the Fire Hose is a straightforward framework for making sense of data. It begins by asking what is the most important thing you need to know in order to move forward. the rest flows from there: finding out what really matters to your customers, putting short-term data into context, asking why data reveals the results it reveals, zeroing in on the most relevant data and what that tells us about our business, and identifying who the silent majority are that we can convert into loyal customers.

Or in short: Get the data, sift through what's relevant, and take action.

Admittedly, the book is written for a business audience, though it has application in other contexts as well. Further, Drinking from the Fire Hose also features interviews with a variety of resource persons, which gives the book a flavor of authenticity. While some may contest the authors' opinions and analyses of certain things -- they argue, I would say unconvincingly, that airports and airlines should have kept operating across North America and Europe despite the ash cloud from the eruption of Finland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano -- it is evident that the overall framework detailed by Frank and Magnone in their book is relevant and can stand on its own.

We live in a world where data is abundant and flows incessantly. Faced with this reality, Drinking from the Fire Hose is a book that might just help us cope.

[Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning in Information will be published by Portfolio on 1 September 2011. This review is based on a pre-publication proof obtained through NetGalley.]

Patapon 3 is Broken

It's no secret I'm a big fan of the Patapon series. In fact, there was a time I would've readily said that if Sony just kept on making Patapon games, I'd keep buying them.

Then came Patapon 3, and now I'm not sure anymore.

You see, Patapon 3 is broken -- so much so, in fact, that it pains me to even think of this game as belonging to the innovative franchise.

From the overall gameplay experience, it feels as if the creative team were at odds with one another in terms of their individual vision for what the game should be. Yes, they started out by keeping the game's underlying conceit: the rhythm-based control scheme, the tongue-in-cheek tribal warfare, the stylish graphics that made the original game a winner. But they decided that they wanted the game to be more like an RPG, and thus introduced a convoluted system of leveling up the party, their abilities, and their weapons that can only be accomplished by so much mindless grinding. On top of this, they also decided that they wanted multiplayer to be a large component of the game, with the effect of reducing the tribe from as much as fifteen to a paltry four. Above all else, it seems they also wanted the game to be more challenging, as evidenced by the sudden spikes in difficulty that will leave even the most patient of players flummoxed.

In short: Patapon 3 takes everything that was fun and charming and simple about Patapon and turns it into a game that is frustrating, tired, and painfully complex.

It's a shame, really. Like many fans, I was eager to find out if the Patapons' adventures would lead them to Gaze upon It at Earthend. The answer to that question lies at the end of Patapon 3 -- but getting there, I'm sorry to say, is so disappointing an experience that I'm afraid one's time can be better spent elsewhere.

Patapon is dead. Long live Patapon.

City of God [Presentation Thursdays]

Some lecture slides on St. Augustine's City of God:

View this presentation on Slideshare

Some might recoil at the idea of discussing the work of a religious philosopher for a course in Political Thought. But it's important to keep in mind that there was a time when politics and religion were inextricably intertwined. Besides, there's a lot if sensible ideas to be had from St. Augustine as regards politics, especially from the standpoint of the separation of Church and State.

[Confused about Presentation Thursdays? Then read the first in the series].

On Truth and Lies

There's a scene in the movie Spy Game (a pretty good movie, by the way), that serves as a reminder not just about value of honesty but also of its practicality.

It occurs during the flashback sequence where Robert Redford's Nathan Muir has begun training Brad Pitt's Tom Bishop as a spy. The two of them sit at a bench nearby an attractive young lady, and Muir instructs Bishop to "Solicit information from someone." "Gladly," Bishop replies, heading off in the direction of the woman.

When Bishop returns after flirting with the woman, he learns a valuable lesson in espionage from Muir:

Muir: You just gave her four pieces of information for one dubious impersonal fact.

Bishop: I just wanted to know where she got that dress.

Muir:: What did you tell her? One, you're straight; two, your engaged; three tomorrow's your girl's birthday; and four, you have no taste in women's fashion."

What if she were an asset? You told her four lies that now have to be true.

This scene never fails to strike a chord with me because I often find that the "little white lie" has become so ingrained in modern culture as to become not just normal, but almost expected. We seem to have no qualms telling people that "We're nearly there" when in truth we haven't even left for that appointment, or that some task is "almost done" even if we haven't started. And how many times have any of us made up some excuse or another for not making it to a function or engagement, just because, really, we don't want to go?

I'll admit: it's easy simply to fudge and dissemble, especially when the alternative is to run the risk of offending someone with the truth over a very small matter. Maybe in such instances the "little white lie" is at best permissible. Yet at some point it becomes hard to keep track of what the real score is, and even if one's small lies do not escalate into bigger and bolder falsehoods, even the smallest lie can have an irreparable impact on one's credibility once the truth comes to light.

Which brings me back to the movie. Muir is right: at some point all lies have to be true. Not even the best liar can make that happen.

Wisdom in Hygiene?

Soap can double as shaving cream, but not toothpaste.

Toothpaste can double as shaving cream, but not soap.

Shaving cream can neither double as toothpaste nor soap.

Make of this what you will.

Obliquity

In Obliquity, John Kay argues that, sometimes, the shortest distance between two points isn't a straight line.

Such is Kay's principle of obliquity: that goals are sometimes best achieved indirectly. Naturally, the corollary of the argument is that too much focus or too direct an approach can actually be counterproductive, as when people overcomplicate what is otherwise simple or generally encounter difficult obstacles when approaching a problem head-on. Thus, sometimes the best results/discoveries/accomplishments are unearthed or achieved without initially meaning to do so -- directly, at any rate.

Now some may be compelled to ask: but isn't that obvious enough anyway? Perhaps. On balance, it would be fair to criticize Kay's underlying thesis as bordering on the simplistic, nevermind that it is insightful and entertaining, after a fashion. Indeed, it becomes apparent soon enough that Kay invokes a limited set of examples repeatedly to argue his point. Furthermore, he does himself few favors by presenting readers with a meandering discussion, apparently struggling to adapt his original article on obliquity, which appeared in his Financial Times column, into something deserving of a book-length treatment (which arguably it does not).

In that sense, Obliquity is less an exposition and more an extended manifesto of a straightforward idea, often discussed in a seemingly rambling fashion.

But then again, what else would one expect from a book about obliquity?