Snippets and Highlights
The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, "The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say."
Imagine you have ten roles to fill, and you ask ten colleagues to each hire one person. Obviously each person will try to recruit the best person they can find – that’s the same as asking one person to choose the best ten hires he can find, right? Wrong. Anyone choosing a group of ten people will instinctively deploy a much wider variance than someone hiring one person. The reason for this is that with one person we look for conformity, but with ten people we look for complementarity.
Logic may be a good way to defend and explain a decision, but it is not always a good way to reach one.
The more data you have, the easier it is to find support for some spurious, self-serving narrative. The profusion of data in future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.