Do statistics tell the entire story?
Do statistics tell the entire story?Managers must make effective use of the numbers they generate. Here are five tips to help ensure that you can rely on the numbers.
Are defect rates declining? Is customer satisfaction rising? You inspect the numbers, but you're not sure whether to believe them. It isn't that you fear fraud or manipulation, it's that you don't know how much faith to put in statistics.
You're right to be cautious. "The actual statistical calculations represent only 5 percent of the manager's work," says Frances Frei, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who teaches two-day statistics seminars to corporate managers. "The other 95 percent should be spent determining the right calculations and interpreting the results."
Here are some guidelines for using statistics effectively, derived from Frei's seminar and other sources. Although the perspectives offered here won't qualify you to be a high-powered statistical analyst, they will help you decide what to ask of the analysts whose numbers you rely on.
1. Know what you know—and what you're only asserting
2. Be clear about what you want to discover
3. Don't take causality for granted
4. With statistics, you can't prove things with 100 percent certainty
5. A result that is numerically or statistically significant may be managerially useless
how to apply these 5 tips on managerial statistics
managerial statistics, marketing, business reporting, decision support system
Labels: business reporting, decision support system, managerial statistics, marketing
posted by Victor Lloyd Smith @ 11:13 PM
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