Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

This has been a very interesting read but there is one thing that needs to be said about numbers (statistics).  While working for a snack food company who continues to produce not only snack foods but double digit cost reduction every year I learned a very important lesson. "Numbers never lie but you can make them say anything you want."  People use statistics to make their point or justify their position and if they are good at working the numbers to come up with those statistics they will succeed in proving their point. 

I was thinking about this, this afternoon, and remembered another basic story about statistics. It concerns a guy who came up with an idea for a hardware device to be used with computers.

He was quite excited, and talked with a number of people, including a business expert. That expert told the guy he shouldn`t bother because at the very best, he might be lucky to capture only 1% of the market, and that wasn`t worth the effort.

The inventor laughed, saying that the entire computer hardware industry was a multi-billion dollar operation, and he`d be very happy with only 1% of multiple billions of dollars. He`d even be happy with a fraction of 1%.

:-) You`re right that number don`t lie, but that you can make them appear to say anything. Same with polls, yet people continue to believe them as if they were coming from on High. On the other hand, we could say this is another way of culling the herd.