Step back. Close your eyes. Can you see the world? How big is the world in your mind? Do you see it as land masses … do you see it as a set of economic forces . . . do you see it as clusters of people? Do you see patterns of exchange that connect all of these aspects? Can you put names to any of the pieces of your jigsaw? Can you tell me how big, strong, old, reliable, stable any of these elements are? Amazing thing, the human brain. You have absorbed, often without realising it, a great deal of information about the world, and have assembled it into a somewhat coherent understanding. I call this the worldview map.
Sure, this is pretty simple, and sure, most of our maps have a great deal of detail and complexity at the local level, and less as the scope widens, but, trust me you have one of these.
On the basis of your worldview map, you make decisions about how to interact with the world – repeat – you make decisions.
Enough pseudo-philosophy. Let me nail this to the wall
The better the information you have, the better the decisions you are likely to make.
And being a lazy guy, I want to make good decisions, since that way I do not have to do things over again. An able executive is doing fairly well if they reach the ‘right’ decision 70% of the time (note it used to be 55%, but the bar got raised). Small business types and entrepreneurs need to make the ‘right’ decision even more often, simply because the margin for error is so thin. You have basically three paths to improving your decisions,
- have better decision making processes
- have more valid mental models of reality and the world
- have better information to put in those mental models
So, lets talk about information. There is no such thing as free information –surely that is clear to everyone. Yes, there is ‘free information’ made available by a lot of sources – government, the press, academia, even many businesses. As my co-poster mentioned when talking about Opens Source Software, ‘Free’ does not mean there is no cost.
Cost of Acquisition and Delousing
You are busy. Getting information takes time. Time is money. Getting and processing information costs you time and money. A downloaded report is of no value to you until you have read it, and digested it. Further, raw data (and so information) needs to analysed, and some meaning extracted. That meaning then needs to be fitted into your reality map of the world. To make matters worse, sometimes the information was not collected with your purpose in mind, and needs to be converted. As I write, it is reported that in 2007, some $18 billion USD was spent on video games. So what?
We live in an age of information . . .
(Ahh, enough cliches already . . .)
No really. What that really means is that you need to validate the information you get, because there is so much of it, and part of it is simply incorrect, misleading, or incompetently assembled. You may need multiple confirming reports from credible sources to gain some assurance that the information is valid. I call this delousing. My preferred approach is to read at least 3 alternative reports (if I can get them), so that I can feel confident about the core information presented. True, I only do this with information that is really important to me, because time is money, and the hour only has 60 minutes, less coffee breaks.
Free and not so Free
There are three avenues of information gathering.
The first is public domain secondary research, meaning, free as in no price-tag. Chief amongst these sources are government statistical reports, and publicly published company reports.
The second is restricted access secondary research – meaning generally, that you have to pay for it. Sometimes the seller is a private research firm that follows a given industry or sector, and generates detailed reports on, for instance, neutraceuticals, or networking technologies. Other times, it is the publisher of a journal –academic, professional, or trade association – that makes the research available for the price of a subscription.
The third is known as primary research, where you directly design an information gathering process, pay to have it executed, pay to have it processed, and pay to have a report generated. Sometimes this effort is contracted out to a research firm, but it can also be undertaken in-house. When we are talking about small independent businesses and entrepreneurs, it is most often undertaken in-house. That means - by you - in case you were wondering . . .
Primary or Secondary – which will it be? What is your budget? What is your timeframe? What quality does it need to be? And which tactic will you use for different objectives. I hear you say that you don’t do this kind of thing – rubbish! I guarantee that you do it every single day of your life. The only choice you need to make is to decide to do it intelligently (the lazy guy’s way) or . . .
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