In what must be one of the most serendipituous moments of my recent life I hit upon 37Signals' Getting Real TOC page after doing a search of a string of text that randomly entered my mind. (The whole book's available online for free? Wow!) I'd first read Getting Real in its physical form (borrowed from a local... Continue Reading →
Analytics Adoption: Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary Technology
In this post about analytics adoption, I'd like to start with a short story. The wife and I got ourselves each a Samsung Galaxy S4 over the weekend. Though it’s a great phone, we couldn’t help but feel that there was a distinct lack of a “wow” factor. We both moved to the S4 from... Continue Reading →
User requests are like hunger pangs
“So, when is the [request] going to be ready?” he asks me, the fourth person to ask in a one-week period. This, I think to myself, is probably real hunger. “I’m working on it,” I reply, which means I’m waiting it out to determine how important the request really is. The moment I can confidently... Continue Reading →
What do you do? I’m an analyst.
“So,” my wife’s friend asks, “what do you do?” I pause for a moment, prepare to say “business analyst”, but then decide not to because I didn’t think she’d understand what I did. I look at my wife and ask her, “what do I do?”, hoping she'd have a better answer. My wife looks at... Continue Reading →
Automated out of a job
“Most of the time,” my friend told me,” they were just doing really manual work. Copying and pasting, doing very routine things that could have been automated. And they’d do these things for 8 or 9 hours a day, sometimes more. They’d come back on Saturdays just to finish their work.” He was talking about... Continue Reading →
On Analysing Big Data and Storytelling
There’s a neat post on analysing big data and storytelling on an HBR blog worth checking out. From the post: Data scientists want to believe that data has all the answer. But the most important part of our job is qualitative: asking questions, creating directives from our data, and telling its story. That’s a neat... Continue Reading →
How to read library books
There are 14 library books on my table staring back at me as I write this. Six borrowed on my card (maxed). Six borrowed on my dad's card, which I have permanently borrowed (also maxed). And two on the wife's card (not maxed, but soon to be). As the wife tidies my desk (again), she... Continue Reading →
A quote on salary negotiation
There is a great passage on salary negotiation from the book Purple Squirrel by Michael B. Junge, that reminds that in salary negotiation, it's useful to think multiple steps ahead of your next move, knowing that in a relationship winning the salary negotiation battle is not winning the career war. Traditional negotiation works in the context of... Continue Reading →
In defence of “It Depends” (vs. “Maybe”)
"It depends" is one of those really important concepts that not many people use. Perhaps because it lives in the uncomfortable, ambiguous territory between “yes” and “no”. Sure, “maybe”, too, lives in this ambiguous territory. But “maybe” doesn’t commit to saying that ultimately a proper answer exists. “It depends” does. “It depends” is like the... Continue Reading →
This is a story worth reading: How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail
Donn, fragments 