Quotes About Analysis

You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success—or are they holding you back? —Clement Stone

Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.

We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington

This is a survey, not an encyclopedia; a study, not a painting; an essay, not a mathematical or historical proof.

That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.

The searching human mind is not satisfied merely to discover facts. We also want to know how things happen and why.

To use the molecular clock in such a way requires the calibration of its "ticking rate.

The first time you attempt a retrospective that goes beyond asking "What went well?" and "What should we do differently?" it will take time to prepare.

The key to success in temporary analysis is twofold. First: we must remember it is temporary. Focal analysis is not knowledge. Successfully returning to subsidiary indwelling to looking from our practices and skills and analyses to their meaningful integrative bearing on the world—that is knowing.

Part One describes how McKinsey thinks about business problems. It shows what it means to be fact-based, structured, and hypothesis-driven.

When a client asks the question "How do I boost my profits?" the first thing McKinsey does is take a step back and ask the question "Where do your profits come from?" The answer to this is not always obvious, even to people who have been in their particular business for years.

How do you avoid that trap? The McKinsey way is to take an occasional step back from the continual grind of fact gathering and analysis and to ask yourself what you have learned over the past week (or two weeks, or whatever). How does the new information fit into your initial hypothesis? If it doesn't, how might it change that hypothesis? Doing these little reality checks now and then could save you from chasing down blind alleys. As a final

In another case, a McKinsey team went in to evaluate expansion opportunities for a division of a manufacturing company. After a few weeks of gathering and analyzing data, the team realized that what the division needed was not expansion; it was closure or sell-off.

The McKinsey problem-solving process begins with research. Before a team can construct an initial hypothesis, before it can disaggregate a problem into its components and uncover the key drivers, it has to have information.

At the start of a McKinsey-ite's career, most of his time is spent gathering data, whether from one of the Firm's libraries, from McKinsey's many databases, or from the Internet. Gathering, filtering, and analyzing data is the skill exercised most by new associates. As a result, McKinsey-ites have learned a number of tricks for jump-starting their research. You can use these tricks to find the answers to your business problem too.

one of my jobs at the start of an engagement was to search PDNet for anything that would shed light on our current project: comparable industries, comparable problems. Inevitably, any PDNet query produced a mountain of documents that I then had to wade through to find the few that might be relevant. Still, this long day's (and, as often as not, night's) work usually yielded something to point us in the right direction.

The moral of this story is that an initial hypothesis is not a prerequisite for successful problem solving. Having one will help organize and forward your thinking, but if you can't come up with one, don't despair. Any McKinsey-ite will tell you that no business problem is immune to the power of fact-based analysis. Put together enough facts, combine them with some creative thinking, and you will come up with a solution.

the lazy assumption that greed—which is demonstrably harmful to the individual who gets caught up in it—is somehow beneficial when replicated across our social institutions does not stand the test of any contemplative analysis of how lasting happiness is actually achieved.

Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.

Policy analysis is a social and political activity.

I'm pleased to offer analysis of public policy and politics to the millions of Americans who get their news from Fox.

L]et them be their own Rorschach tests[.]

Definition of a Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits than under analysis some of them won't stand up either.

Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.