“The best way to compile inaccurate information that no one wants is to make it up.” Scott Adams
I met a guy the other day who was telling me about his business – tool and die for what it’s worth – and during the “how’s it going” phase he said, “pretty well actually. In fact the year is starting off really strong.” He went on to explain that his company is doing all their trend analysis based off of 2008 instead of 2009. Essentially they’re skipping ‘09.
My initial thought was “that’s goofy; you can’t just skip over an entire year”. But the more I thought about it the more it started to make sense. So I started asking almost everyone I talked to about it and found a lot of people doing pretty much the same thing by doing comparisons of important trend numbers using ’06, ’07, ’08 and ’10.
The thinking is 2009 was so bad in so many ways that if you can’t do better this year then you’re probably wasting your time. Thus, trying to put significance on comparisons is fruitless.
I can see the company party now, ‘raise your glasses everyone, lets celebrate growing Q1 by 10% over Q1 last year when we absolutely sucked”. Or better a recent Dilbert episode had the pointy-haired boss giving this update:
“The Company is happy to announce that compared to previous years, we improved our rate of revenue decline. We’ve been doing great since we redefined success as a slowing of failure”.
That sounds worthy of a celebration. After all, there’s some merit to celebrating victories as I wrote in a past blog. Celebrate.
So in a lot of places 2009 is being considered such an anomaly that a lot of people are just eliminating it from their data and memory banks.
Now, if we could only erase it from our money banks.
I met a guy the other day who was telling me about his business – tool and die for what it’s worth – and during the “how’s it going” phase he said, “pretty well actually. In fact the year is starting off really strong.” He went on to explain that his company is doing all their trend analysis based off of 2008 instead of 2009. Essentially they’re skipping ‘09.
My initial thought was “that’s goofy; you can’t just skip over an entire year”. But the more I thought about it the more it started to make sense. So I started asking almost everyone I talked to about it and found a lot of people doing pretty much the same thing by doing comparisons of important trend numbers using ’06, ’07, ’08 and ’10.
The thinking is 2009 was so bad in so many ways that if you can’t do better this year then you’re probably wasting your time. Thus, trying to put significance on comparisons is fruitless.
I can see the company party now, ‘raise your glasses everyone, lets celebrate growing Q1 by 10% over Q1 last year when we absolutely sucked”. Or better a recent Dilbert episode had the pointy-haired boss giving this update:
“The Company is happy to announce that compared to previous years, we improved our rate of revenue decline. We’ve been doing great since we redefined success as a slowing of failure”.
That sounds worthy of a celebration. After all, there’s some merit to celebrating victories as I wrote in a past blog. Celebrate.
So in a lot of places 2009 is being considered such an anomaly that a lot of people are just eliminating it from their data and memory banks.
Now, if we could only erase it from our money banks.
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