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    Counting Our Way To Oblivion: Or Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
    Counting Our Way To Oblivion: Or Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
    Counting Our Way To Oblivion: Or Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
    Ebook34 pages51 minutes

    Counting Our Way To Oblivion: Or Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

    By David Richey

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    About this ebook

    In "Counting Our Way To Oblivion," author David Richey examines the increasing reliance upon statistics to evaluate, well, everything.  In particular, Richey demonstrates how businesses attempt to manage quality and behavior through analytics, and why this methodology is misguided. Richey uses lessons from numerous industries and famous leaders, as well as his 30 years of experience as the head of a service industry consulting firm, to offer guidance to a new generation of business managers looking to wean themselves off statistics and rely more on their skills, instincts, experience and desire for excellence to achieve their full potential.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMay 12, 2014
    ISBN9781483527611
    Counting Our Way To Oblivion: Or Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

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      Counting Our Way To Oblivion - David Richey

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      Part One

      Why You Cannot Count Your Way to Quality

      Anyone who claims to be able to quantitatively rank the qualitative aspects of complex organizations like hotels, cities or hospitals is either misguided or being untruthful.

      Perhaps it’s just human nature (or human hubris) to think that we can easily determine the best of the best in any given category by simply applying a standardized examination, a direct competition, or an election. Let’s use sports as an example. In Major League Baseball (MLB), the champion team is determined through the annual World Series, which consists of up to seven games played over a period of about 10 days, with the victor being the first team to win four of those games. On the surface at least, this concept of multiple head-to-head competitions might seem like a rigorous methodology – one guaranteed to ensure that the best team always triumphs.

      Well, if we believe that, we would be wrong about 40% of the time. Noted physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow² explains: ...even if one assumes that the better team has a lopsided 55/45 edge over the inferior one, the lesser team will win the seven-game World Series 40% of the time.

      In any single game, the lesser team in Mlodinow’s example has a 45% chance of winning. One might think that a seven-game series would dramatically lower these odds for the lesser team. But, as Mlodinow points out, even in a seven-game series, the lesser team still has a healthy chance of winning the necessary four victories to become the champion. If you wanted to test the teams to a statistically significant result – to essentially confirm the superiority of one team over the other – you would need to play a 269-game series. In that case, the result would be certain to within a 5% margin of error.

      Want to see how Mr. Mlodinow explores the statistics and economics of wine tasting(Wall St. Journal, Nov 20, 2009)

      MLB and other sports leagues are an ideal platform for this kind of numerical comparison because they are skill-based, are in a perpetual state of competition, and are statistically measured to an absurd

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