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Back in the '90s, I met a guy who made quite a bit of money off specialized construction projects in the developing world. He invested a fair amount of that into a rather popular religious children's series, doing very well in the process. Unfortunately, this led him to assume that he was "in the entertainment business." He hired a company to research the direct-to-video market and tell him what types of product had the best return per dollar. After a lot of time and money, they came back with a report that said, in essence, that the two top performers in the DTV space were science fiction and vampire horror. The research was sound. The data were irrefutable. He immediately sank millions of dollars into producing a direct-to-video trilogy about vampires from space. A few years later, I saw him running one of those hot dog concessions outside a Home Depot.[1] The commonplace version of this are SMB executives who, primed by HBR articles about data-driven decisionmaking, ascribe magical powers to simple linear regressions, believe that a single model can tell them exactly how to unvaryingly run heterogeneous business lines, think overfit just means you can make the model even better, and try to force-feed explanatory variables down the throats of their stats consultants. Analytics is a powerful and necessary toolset, but it's become harder to keep the c-suite from spiking the sauce. [1] Hell of a work ethic, though. Not long after that he had a few dozen of those carts operating throughout the region. Never did see him again, but you've got to respect a guy who doesn't understand the meaning of "abject failure." |