Friday, December 23rd, 2011
Our August post on a botched-up scale in a “Spiegel” graphic has made some waves. A magazine for infographic designers picked up on our arguments and dedicated a two-page spread to the topic – with a certain finesse that you could even apply to management reporting.
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
Controllers are supposed to be consultants. Their reports are supposed to have a message – ideally, in the title as well as in the comments and summaries. Today, we’ll learn how to formulate messages appositely with some tips from Wolf Schneider.
Friday, November 11th, 2011
Managers receive more information than they can take in. In fact, their information absorption capacity is the main bottleneck in Business Intelligence. Here are a few ways we can increase it.
Friday, October 21st, 2011
Together with Rolf Hichert, we have been battling against graphical opulence and anorexic content in reporting since 2007. Recently, we hosted our tenth, joint Advanced Seminar on Industrial Reporting in Nuremberg. That makes it time to reflect on Hichert’s SUCCESS concept and our Industrial Reporting.
Friday, September 30th, 2011
People often talk big when they talk about BI. Exaggerations go along with the hype but they remain what they are: exaggerated. Today, we are going to talk back – about the ROI that BI can deliver.
Friday, September 9th, 2011
Logarithmic cynics, get ready for part 2 of our U.S. national debt analysis and our continuing crusade for charts with integrity. Today, we will give the final death blow to linear scales.
Friday, August 19th, 2011
People say that whether you use a logarithmic scale or a linear one for the development of national debt, the world population or the global climate depends on what you want to show. Wrong, we say. Linear scales regularly mislead.
Friday, July 29th, 2011
On 8 July 2011, a Space Shuttle flew into space for the last time. Two of its predecessors had crashed thanks to PowerPoint – or rather, the information culture of slide stacks. Here’s why display requirements shouldn’t be allowed to be a bottleneck for communicating information.
Friday, July 8th, 2011
It seems that nothing can shake people’s confidence in traffic light systems. Günther Beckstein, a former Bavarian Minister of the Interior and later Bavarian Prime Minister, tried to use them to protect the state-owned bank BayernLB from damage – to no avail. Now Franz Josef Nick, CEO of Targobank, wants to use them to protect uneasy investors. And who is protecting us from the people protecting us?
Friday, June 17th, 2011
I can’t stop thinking about Berlin. Let’s head once again into the ballroom and look up at what was once a gallery. Bank managers used to stand up there many years ago. Do we need to observe something to supervise it? What is the right perspective for viewing data?