Class 01 - 2016-09-12 - Pitfalls

Reading: How to become a CEO

• NY Times article
• Have experience in as many functional areas as possible
• Switching industries have negative correlation with corporate success.
• Working in 4 different function same efect as MBA from top-five program
• Surge in hybrid jobs, expertise in more than one competency
• Best CEOs are jack of all trades
• Within a larger company, pursue opportunities that are adjacent to yet different from existing experience.
• This is correlation not causality.
• Need to understand how different parts of the company interact, how other people do their job.
• Bosses who take chances on a person that isn't qualified for on paper.
• "Comfort zone"

An Economist's guide to Visualizing Data

• Data Viz
• Pre-attentive visual processing: shapes, contrast, hue, size, orientation
• Picture Superiority Effect - retain mor information seen through pictures than words
• Three principles:
  1. Show the data
  2. reduce the clutter
  3. Visualizations complement the text and contain enough information to stand alone
• support the reader's aquisition of information quickly. Graphs are for the reader, not the author
• text and graph can be integrated, don't ask the reader to decode shorthand; try better graph titles
• Bar chart: tip to eliminate legend and use it as the axis label
• flatten the 3D chart
• don't make people tilt their head sideways to read the label
• break out spaghetti chart with multiple trend lines into multiple charts with different series highlited contrast relief.
• Pie chart labels should be right by the crust of the pie, not in a legend
• Alternative to bar chart: Part to whole mini-pie charts
• Alternative to pie chart: a paired column bar chart, showing change over time of the individual pie slices. slope chart too.
• Form: Static vs Interactive. Function explanitory vs exploratory.
• Exploratory: let the user bring their own conclusions to the data.