by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
No project has perfect data For the jaded and and road-weary consultants, this will sound like an understatement. In fact, it’s usually like an Easter egg hunt where the team has a good idea where the data eggs might be, but can’t be 100% sure until they...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Good decisions require data Of course. Without some robust thinking and analysis based on data, it’s called (um) . . . guessing. Even if you are not a “quant”, you better be able to explain what a regression is and roughly how it works. Look –...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
For consultants and all those who solve problems for a living, we know that “average” is a bit of a dirty word. A misnomer. “Average” is a four-letter word Averages are lazy; shows a lack of effort. Averages are inherently reductive and often...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Wrote this blog post in 2018, it was prescient Reading Pandora Media’s financial statements is like rubbernecking at a car crash on the highway. Completely not necessary, not classy, and perhaps a waste of time. Two years ago I wrote about Pandora’s...
by Consultant's Mind | Fun
Who doesn’t love the Olympics? It’s a chance to see the world’s best compete in a safe environment, free from politicians’ rhetoric and jingoism. It’s inspiring to hear athletes’ stories. It’s good to refresh yourself on all...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Yes, this morning I did 4 hours of data entry Yes, data entry. Our project was in a time crunch and we had major issues getting good operational data, so we begrudgingly took some print outs and manually typed them into excel. Yikes. Yes, we did look at other OCR...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Data is often imperfect As consultants we know that perfect data is a myth. No matter the organization or website, data is gunky, irregular, and often broken. Was at Starbucks this morning doing my travel and expenses. Went to the American Express website and...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
I am a terrible stock-picker Trust me, my portfolio returns lag the general market. If you read about a stock on this consulting blog – just look the other way. I am writing about it because management consultants need to understand how the capital markets,...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
I voted, I always do Today is an election day in the United States for Congress and Governors. I always vote, as it is one of my rights as an citizen. That said, very little gets done with state and national elections – it is largely marketing, divvying up of...
by Consultant's Mind | Learning
Consultants are in the business of taking messy, unorganized data and turning it into information, and hopefully, some insights. Here is a simple example of excel clean up, and the steps to copy, paste, filter, sort, and cleanse data. For most consultants, the data...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Does your project require excel / Tableau? Whatever your project scope, if you are not using excel – to categorize, count, calculate, or correlate things – I would argue that you really don’t have much of a project. It’s my bias, but a project...
by Consultant's Mind | Fun
Just watched the Alabama-Georgia game. For international readers, this was the equivalent of the semi-finals for college football between two rival teams who both had a winning season so far (11 wins – 1 loss). It was a very close game which Alabama won...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
Better Olympic metrics please As a consultant, it always seemed odd that news reporters routinely compare the medal count between the USA and China – after all, the USA has 530 athletes compared to China’s 380. Seems like the total number of medals is only...
by Consultant's Mind | Graphics
The Olympics are a wonder At a macro-level, it is a family get-together of 200+ nations where all the international relations and the geopolitical clatter is replaced with sports. It’s a rare opportunity where xenophobia, racial stereotypes, and hatred are not...
by Consultant's Mind | Fun
Happy Birthday! The United States is celebrating its 236th birthday today. I saw an article from Mental Floss Magazine by Matt Soniak called How All 50 States Got Their Names. It was well-timed for July 4th, but a bit long at 5,000 words. After reading through the...
by Consultant's Mind | Consulting
Management consultants are always on the prowl for good data. After all, it is the stuff that client recommendations are made of. To a cynic, it might seem obvious. The title of this post would be a kin to: “Why chefs love ingredients” or “Why district attorneys like...
