How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Businessby
Douglas W. HubbardMy background and practice have been about quantitative analysis of many different forms. Before you do any kind of analysis you have to have data. To have any kind of data you have to measure something. This book makes the point that most anything can be measured.
We had a course called 'economic analysis', which tried to cover some if the same things, but this book does a better job. The author provides a number of rules-of-thumb than can be useful to anyone. I particularly like the section that deals with calibration in measurement when using multiple human experts. Very nicely explained and useful.
Not many equations, but the individual sections need to be carefully read, so this is still not the book for just handing out to managers. His general modeling philosophy reminds me of the work of
Sam Savage.
He makes a good case for really understanding the economics of the information that you are gathering. What does it cost to gather the information and what value will be provided by various levels of reducing model uncertainty? What is the difference between expected value of information and the expected value of
perfect information? I have rarely see this concept covered.
Another section deals with the ever important problem of how many samples or measurements you need to come up with for a useful model. Often people would come to me with a half dozen measurements and I would recite the statistics litany that you needed more measurements to get statistically valid results. Hubbard makes a good case that such results are rarely measured outside of a context and you can get valuable knowledge from just a few measurements.
More 'modern' Bayesian and Prediction Market methods are well outlined. He also describes the Internet as an instrument, and how sources like the Wikipedia can be used, with care, as a way to construct data models. He also cautions about methods that will add error to initial estimates. Some good Excel examples of applications, though he should have provided more and moved them to an appendix.
A section on using human experts to make judgement is useful since often measurements of intangibles are in people's heads, and you have to consider how non-rational and non-cognitive elements of their opinions will influence the results.
The book is based on years of practical applications, good practical examples throughout. I highly recommend this book for the practitioner.
The
book's online site.
Word is out that Google's virtual world's platform, called Lively is aimed at an eventual presence in online games. I have only taken a brief look at Lively and was not overly impressed, more like a 3D chat. I still think of games as a form of directed simulation, ultimately good for staging scenarios for business. There are examples of that but it is still too hard to set up and deliver specific applications. 
