Step away from the spreadsheets

Yesterday there was a news published on WSJ titled “Four CIA Secrets That Can Boost Your Career”

Point 3 tells an interesting story about a situation where human intelligence people made a mockery of the spreadsheets and based on which america spread the propaganda for quite long time that Iraq is sitting on a stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  The truth turned out to be completely opposite.

Corporate world is full of such stories where so-called “smart people”  over-rely on numbers but actually the metrics, forecasts are far away from the ground reality. Being from a capacity management field I face such scenario on a daily basis where people can’t help themselves and their complete thought process revolves around numbers. The term I would use for such people is data-aholic.

The important point to make out is one should understand the underlying meaning of the data they’re dealing with. But during my interactions with people over the recent years who claim they do technical work (for example;), but when someone peeps through the curtain, it come to know that they’ve been doing their technical work in spreadsheets.

In the times where everyone is trying to automate everything, logic being put into kernels, little room for technicians/administrators, wisdom of people are deteriorating, its not a surprise that people taking decisions purely based on numbers.

God bless us!