• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

Datadoodle

  • Home
  • About Datadoodle
  • Contact Ted Cuzzillo
  • cities

No dashboard, just an ironing board

June 14, 2011 by Ted Cuzzillo 2 Comments

As if to renounce one more convention of business, a Berkeley-area businessperson I know couldn’t find data, so he went out and got some of his own. He had to evaluate market areas.

For three days, he stood by an ironing board with a map on top in front of the Cheese Board in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. Each customer coming in or out got handed two stick-on dots, red to mark home and blue to mark work. His map quickly revealed patterns and commute routes.

It was easy. “Everybody’s curious,” said Terry Baird, who had made a career of cooperative/collective food retailing. He had sold advertising for 10 years, and later found himself appointed to unravel the bankruptcy of a once-huge food distributor, an experience he calls “my MBA.” He approached it all without training, only logic and nerve, such as with the ironing board. “It’s like running a three-card monte. A group gathers around you.”

In 1996, he was part of a newly formed collective inspired by the Cheese Board. The new collective trained there as they decided on the new store’s location.

Terry’s question: would any of the proposed locations for a new store overlap another store’s market area?

In three days, he had the answer. On weekdays, none overlapped. But on Saturdays, all did; that’s when people drove in from all over the Bay Area.

The best software might be the kind made without starch.

Posts related to "No dashboard, just an ironing board"

  • Impressions of Strata Conference Strata buzzes. Other events go to sleep for long stretches.…
  • Getting over the ‘P’ word to expand BI horizons Many in the business intelligence industry talk about organizational problems…
  • Free-the-data movement meets privacy Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates…
  • Qlik asks what a difference a device makes When I first heard of Qlik's research into use of…
  • Qlik road goes past white coated smart guys An earlier version of this post, with a different conclusion…
  • Alteryx and Tableau, yin and yang Many of those who watch the amazing acrobatics in Tableau…
FacebookTwitterSubscribeLinkedin

Filed Under: analysis & methods, innovation, management Tagged With: innovation

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Kyle Chastain says

    April 21, 2012 at 4:25 pm

    Ted,
    Love your writing style. Also I very much enjoy your verbalizing the daily challenges and applications of business intelligence. I get the feeling that you too feel that small business adoption of BI is the next game changer.

  2. Ted Cuzzillo says

    April 24, 2012 at 2:51 pm

    Thanks, Kyle. BI for extra-small businesses, yes. Personal metrics, too.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe here!

Search Datadoodle

Most Shared Posts

  • Data driven? No, you’re story driven, says German data scientist...
    Just when data seems to be approaching maturity as a touchstone in business, along comes a data scie
    8 Shares
  • Free-the-data movement meets privacy...
    Back when data was little and simple, self-service analysis advocates started the chant, “Free
    6 Shares
  • Data guided, not data driven...
    I like data same as the next guy. But I don’t like pronouncements like the one I heard at an i
    7 Shares
  • Bad stories stop good data at the water cooler...
    We agree by now that data’s a good compass. One neglected question is tougher: Which map? Everyone
    4 Shares
  • How to find a story in data: What a news reporter would do...
    Originally published on December 15, 2015 in BI This Week, a TDWI publication. A data analyst raised
    4 Shares
  • Data: it’s just notation, not reality...
    The always fascinating Donald Farmer, former Qlik exec and now Treehive Strategy principal, has news
    4 Shares
  • Scenarios for a Qlik Sense data story...
    Real data storytellers know that data framed in a story is much more effective than data standing al
    3 Shares
  • Smart cities / Cisco’s smart pipes p...
    Cisco’s plumbing will soon feed Teradata’s brains, according to last week’s announ
    3 Shares
  • What’s Tableau doing in Munich?...
    What’s Tableau doing buying HyPer, the German OLTP/OLAP hybrid? The March 10 announcement brou
    3 Shares
  • Public sector CIOs have a tough job...
    Public sector CIOs have a tough job / San Jose’s winding road toward “smart” / Bil
    3 Shares
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Secondary Sidebar

Recent posts

The new Teradata in three words

The week Smartest Systems tried out at Port of Los Angeles

Teradata’s Customer Journey in smart cities: still beta

Algorithmic city, Sicilian style

Business analysts tell about Vertica

Tableau’s first conference / What a little tool proved

Content marketing / Building trust with trust

Data driven but wabi-sabi driven, too

Who needs data literacy when you’ve got data pictures? / Tableau

Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb

Copyright © 2019 · eleven40 Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in