There’s a certain impression among management that “apparent” isn’t enough to make justifiable decisions. To make proper decisions, you need facts. The most obvious type of facts are numbers.
There is a common misconception that numbers and a story about them are required for good decisions. Worse, some seem to think they’re all it takes.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is bullshit and MBAs were a mistake.
Netflix is especially susceptible to this since their platform gave them far far more data about viewing habits than any previous media platform. I’m not surprised they got addicted to data, and then went down the fallacious path of “facts don’t exist unless they’re in our data”.
I think they are falling into the same trap as the quantitative fallacy that McNamara fell into. They only think in terms of numbers and nothing else. So they only care about what’s measurable. You know what’s not measurable? Art. Taste. Their entire business model. So of course a bunch of MBAs are going to fuck it all up because they are just extrapolating what was good in the past and what is quantifiable. Of course they have no over arching strategy and their tent poles end like a wet fart because they don’t have any direction in mind and they can’t stop fucking inserting themselves. I get the feeling that the execs at Netflix (much like most producers) don’t even like the productions they are a part of. Like watching the McDonald’s CEO try to eat a hamburger.
Worse yet, they’ll pick something measurable, declare it an appropriate proxy, handwave any concerns about accuracy with the 80/20 rule (without ever checking whether the inaccuracy actually fits into those 20%), talk about the higher level view and big picture and make my life hard by refusing to actually engage with my questions about what they wanna measure, then complain when they don’t understand the result of my best guess.
Some managers are lovely to work with. Others have a bunch of buzzwords and wisecrack quotes that sound authoritative in place of sound reasoning.
“Data suggests” as if it necessitated a deep study and wasn’t very apparent already.
There’s a certain impression among management that “apparent” isn’t enough to make justifiable decisions. To make proper decisions, you need facts. The most obvious type of facts are numbers.
There is a common misconception that numbers and a story about them are required for good decisions. Worse, some seem to think they’re all it takes.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is bullshit and MBAs were a mistake.
Netflix is especially susceptible to this since their platform gave them far far more data about viewing habits than any previous media platform. I’m not surprised they got addicted to data, and then went down the fallacious path of “facts don’t exist unless they’re in our data”.
I think they are falling into the same trap as the quantitative fallacy that McNamara fell into. They only think in terms of numbers and nothing else. So they only care about what’s measurable. You know what’s not measurable? Art. Taste. Their entire business model. So of course a bunch of MBAs are going to fuck it all up because they are just extrapolating what was good in the past and what is quantifiable. Of course they have no over arching strategy and their tent poles end like a wet fart because they don’t have any direction in mind and they can’t stop fucking inserting themselves. I get the feeling that the execs at Netflix (much like most producers) don’t even like the productions they are a part of. Like watching the McDonald’s CEO try to eat a hamburger.
Worse yet, they’ll pick something measurable, declare it an appropriate proxy, handwave any concerns about accuracy with the 80/20 rule (without ever checking whether the inaccuracy actually fits into those 20%), talk about the higher level view and big picture and make my life hard by refusing to actually engage with my questions about what they wanna measure, then complain when they don’t understand the result of my best guess.
Some managers are lovely to work with. Others have a bunch of buzzwords and wisecrack quotes that sound authoritative in place of sound reasoning.