The Twilight Zone

Management consulting firms are (typically) generalists. They deal with business problems of all shapes and sizes. It’s one of the major draws of the profession — you can’t really get bored, because every couple of months you are assigned a different case in potentially a different industry with a different company with a different set of problems. One day you may be working with a major financial services company and the next day you’ll be helping an agricultural consortium figure out how to store farm products. In other words, it takes a really strange case to throw me off.

Imagine my surprise when, going through old cases, I stumbled on a case where a company which owned several funerary services and retirement homes was attempting to define a growth strategy.

Hmmm… increase the rate of death? Encourage people to buy more expensive cremations and coffins? Tell families that taking care of their elders in-house is bothersome?

Google Reader Upgrades

My favorite feed reader just got three long overdue updates:

1. It can now count to 1000. Back before this Google Reader update (during the wild, young days of the internet), on days when I couldn’t check Google Reader, the unread post count would build up rather quickly. However, instead of being told precisely how many blog posts I had, Google would only tell me that I had “100+” unread posts. Not particularly informative for a company that prides itself on being the organizer of the world’s information. Today, it can go to 1000. I have yet to reach the point where I have that many posts unread, but at this rate, I think in another year or two, Google may update the reader so that it can count to 10000. But right now, our technology just can’t handle numbers that big — I mean why else would we limit the number size?
2. You can use “back” and “forward”. This may seem quite trivial, given that Google Reader is on a webpage and hence one would expect that the back and forward arrows on your toolbar should work like they do on a regular webpage. But, Google Reader is no ordinary webpage, it’s an AJAX application, which means that movement from page to page is not so clear cut. Implementing “forward” and “back” has actually been a challenge for a lot of online Web developers who create AJAX applications, so it’s very nice (and quite a feat for some hapless programmer who probably had to do a lot of unappreciated behind-the-scene work) that they were able to implement this.
3. Search. What do people think of when they think of Google? They think of a search tool that works well. Why use Gmail? Because it has a great user interface and a very good search tool. Why use Google Desktop? Because you get the company who’s the reigning expert on search to help search your computer. Why use Google Scholar? Because its a great way to search for academic papers. The idea is simple. One of the core competencies of Google is search. So why would a company renowned for search, known for improving its product base by adding its legendary search expertise, create a product without search despite the fact that it could clearly benefit from it? Well, the question is no longer relevant, as Google has finally gotten around to implementing search in Google Reader, allowing me to dig through every post I’ve ever read.

Took you long enough, Google.

The Fog of Propaganda

One challenging thing about management consulting is cutting through the “fog of war” — specifically the uncertainty that surrounds the untested beliefs of management. These assumptions are the result of not testing assumptions against data, something which makes the already difficult job of management much harder. After all, how can you manage a company (or advise someone on how to manage a company) if you don’t understand the situation “on the ground”?

In the same vein, how do you choose the right politician if you can’t pierce through the “fog of propaganda” — the attack ads, the “commonsense” knowledge that nobody’s ever bothered testing? Of course, a big deal of politics is about the voter’s values (no statistic in the world will tell you if gay marriage is right or if greater income equality at the expense of total income is a justifiable sacrifice). But how can someone choose the most effective candidate – the candidate whose policies align most closely with a given set of values — without some objective means of testing?

While the hapless entry-level consultant is most likely responsible for the arduous task of fact-checking, today’s American voter has access to two websites which provide objective analyses of political claims: FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com. While the two sites can’t tell you whether or not a given policy will succeed or whether or not a given position is morally right or wrong, they serve as good “reality checks” which will hopefully make it easier to see through the fog and make a more educated choice.

It’s a valuable service, the analog of which in the business world (the various information sources that business analysts and groups sell) is so valuable that it costs an enormous sum to have access to. Hopefully, more people use the site to assess their politicians and hold them accountable for their actions, their claims, and their promises.

Random thought: I wonder what one would do if the two websites did an analysis of each other . . . (“this just in, PolitiFact.com is not as cool as we are”)