Metrics, Quantitative & Iconoclastic

I saw a demo today of HodesIQ, a very cool web-based talent management toolbox. Just for the record, I watch demos about as often as I watch sports. Whether it’s a game or something on the web, I’d rather play than be on the sidelines. But this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up since I was invited by a friend who is so interesting at a dinner party and I wanted to see how she would translate this talent to a sales pitch. I was not disappointed, nor should I have been surprised since people are fairly consistent. What surprised me was I actually liked how the product works. Amazing how they fit all those features in without turning it into a clunky mess. And the metrics outputs are actually understandable by the people whose work needs to be shaped by the feedback they provide. Kudos, folks, for that and the Smart Post which suggests sites to post your jobs on and then gives you feedback on how successful your postings were.  Usable, quantitative metrics.  (Not my favorite qualitative ones, but good ones nonetheless.)

And for the iconoclasts, I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I always believed my husband’s theory on investing (go conservative, especially when you have no idea what’s coming next, but keep some money out to play the long shot), but never understood where he got it from, especially since he is not good at standard math. (I mean things like fractions, not calculus.) But he has always been more right than wrong. Thanks to Taleb’s brilliant follow up to his earlier book, Fooled by Randomness, I now understand why Barry (dear husband) is right. And why the guys who tried to sell me on balanced investment strategies (or whatever they called it) were wrong. That part alone is worth the price of the book, which inexplicably was shelved among the science books in the big chain I bought it at.

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