Every Company Needs a Good Map

Warren Buffet initially passed on Intel and Microsoft I believe, does that make him wrong about everything else? If Mark Cuban or Nike liked your basketball shoe design does that mean you should trash it? How many times are the experts correct vs how many hits did they miss is a better measure of how wrong or right they are. The difference between the number of awful movies we have not seen because pundits did not allow them to be made when compared to the number of great movies they misses is an enormous difference.

This is actually one of the issues with any kind of automated detection system. The ratio of false positives to true positives is as important as the number of true positives detected in the total sample. If the false positive rate is too high then a lot of time is wasted on sorting out the true from false positive selections. If the miss rate (true positives that get by) is too high then the test is not very useful. This is when the pundit should be replaced. Guy Kawaski thought Yahoo was not a good enough idea to be its CEO. So, is Guy to be listened to?

So, do I want Seth to dislike my book? What about my blog? Should I try to get him to dislike it? He is a pundit after all.

Actually by his logic: If he is a pundit and he says something is correct then it is nearly always incorrect. If he is (nearly) always incorrect then why is he a pundit?

Then there is this quote:

"But, the thing to remember is this: if everyone loves it, it is almost certain to have troubles." - I see that with MySpace, YouTube, and Google heading for trouble any day now. What a bunch of failures! It's too bad my man Richard Rosenblatt didn't listen to what everyone was saying when he got hooked up with that MySpace.

Seth, you know I love to read your blog. I just have to remember that some of your posts are meant to get a rise out of your readers and some are correct. I just need to re-read this one to be sure of which it is. Kind of like advertising budgets.