http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2008/04/09/4908-a-midweek-look-at-the-business-blogs.aspx

Wally Bock

The first thing I did after reading your comment was try to find a downloadable version - and ebook version - of “How to Lie with Statistics” - no luck, but I’ll be in the States in a few weeks, and I’ll pick it up then.

I love the approach this indicates - a wise effort to assure that the meeting between author and reader will be one of equals. It’s all well and good to be able to detect something funny about an author’s assertions, evidence, or argumentation, but to be able to arm yourself with the conceptual tools and terminology to fully comprehend and articulate the problem - that’s outstanding! Moreover, it makes more profound and useful for you the reading you do come to see as effective and wise.

Thanks, Steve, for offering this story, and for your kind comments!

Somewhere along the reading journey of life, I began to get an uneasy feeling about the “research-based” foundations of many of the books and articles. So I bought a copy of “How to Lie With Statistics,” originally published in 1954 and resurrected in 1993.

The purpose wasn’t to learn how to do it:-) but to become more adept at how to detect “research” whose underpinnings rested on sand. In our sound-bite culture, 15 seconds of “Research today showed that. . .” can cause the average person to make decisions based on faulty or inconsequential data. The management community, in our eagerness to succeed, seems to be even more prone to this; “management by sound-bit,” if you will.

Sometimes it simply takes a well-founded caution such as yours to force people to begin to pause the next time they see “the latest and greatest.”

Today’s post is a public service. Thank you.