Measurement versus Knowledge

Because I work for a media company, we do a lot of market "research" on the audience side (who they are, what they want), the brand side (what they think of our marks) and more and more on the device/web side. Now that i've been working with the corporate recipe of what makes a "business plan," I fool myself when it comes to its validity as a way to measure market size and product impact.

In order to guard against such hubris, I read a lot about statistics and measurement (to the chagrin of my friends - and to the benefit of Amazon).  Currently I just finished Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Teleb, which is quite dialectic and conversational and made me feel a bit queasy about the numbers I okay weekly.

So now I have a strange challenge: corporate duty versus reality of value. Should I spend all my time doing work that I know doesn't have much "true" value? Even worse, I've now gotten to the point where I ask others to waste their time. My Taleb-like rants in research meetings do not seem to help. (To find out how our brand is doing in 250 million households worldwide, we pay 1000 people to watch television and give us their opinion? So much for double-blind and statistical best practices...)

I've asked the head of my division about this stuff, who is brilliant despite his MBA and ivy league and banking education, who frankly admitted all these "nums" aren't true, but "directional" so I shouldn't "sweat it." He even guarded against my inevitable rant on what the hell does "directional" mean by stating that everyone knows it's pretend, but we need something, something to show the clients and ourselves that we thought about it really hard, maybe the numbers aren't right but the effort is to display that its a prophecy everyone believes.

Okay, I understand it's proof of work. In my little digital media division everyone understands that all forecasting makes little sense since we are all just trying out new ideas and treading water. However, I was just asked to comment of a 10-year divisional plan. 10 years! I just passed on it. I can't forecast what cataclysmic change Apple, Facebook or Google will inflict tomorrow on our sites and mobile offering; 10 years is ridiculous. Moreover, everyone else understands this.

Strangely, the more comfortable I am with making "models" with assumptions, the more valuable my models become...