I’m convinced that every field has “senior shibboleths:” ideas that sound contrarian to the uninitiated, but are, among people with more experience, pretty conventional. These ideas, which are sometimes wise, sometimes trite, and sometimes dangerously wrong, might start as novel theories, but they eventually become secret handshakes for sorting who’s in the club and who’s not. (View Highlight)
Note: How do you update these beliefs ?
His biggest concern was making sure that department leaders have access to consistent reporting. He wanted the business to run on a few critical KPIs, and saw his job as making those metrics available to anyone who needed them.
In telling me this, he inadvertently taught me a lesson much bigger than anything I could teach him. He showed me that my reflexive dismissal of self-serve was wrong because my definition of self-serve was wrong. I assumed he meant one thing; he had done the research to figure out he needed a different thing. He wasn’t looking to enable people to do the rich analysis that we analysts do, nor did he want to solve some generic self-serve problem that he poorly understood; he just wanted to provide an easy way to pull metrics. (View Highlight)
