A Friend of Juice pointed me at a recent dispatch from the Change This web site entitled Elegant Solutions. If you aren't familiar with Change This, it is worth a look. It is an outlet for big thinkers to publish "manifestos" on (mostly) business ideas ranging from marketing and customer service to strategy and innovation.

This particular manifesto by Matthew E. May (a trimmed down version of his book by the same name) reveals the secrets behind innovation at Toyota. It offers a number of themes that resonate with the discussions on this blog. A few of the high points:

"Toyota is in pursuit of 'elegant solutions to real world problems.' Not grand slam homeruns, but groundball singles implemented all across the company by associates that view their role not to be simply doing the work, but taking it to the next level... An elegant solution is one in which the optimal outcome is achieved with the minimal expenditure of effort and expense... [and is] is recognized by its juxtaposition of simplicity and power."

"Great innovation requires understanding and appreciating the concept of elegance as it relates to solving important problems. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: 'I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.' This is one of my favorite quotes—certainly my favorite by OWH.

Elegant solutions avoid the traps of: 1) Swinging for the fences; 2) Getting too clever—i.e. too many bells and whistles; 3) Solving problems frivolously.

"[Innovation] requires that we work the way artists or scientists do: accept the limitations, use them to our advantage, and pursue the simple question that drives the thinking behind every breakthrough, big or small: Is there a better way?" This idea of embracing constraints, which we wrote about a while back, is becoming increasingly embedded in business thinking.

"Artists and scientists own their work and sculpt their job. That’s new school. It’s a different mindset, and anything different is risky... New-schoolers know they’ll get pushback, but they trust their abilities, and continue to employ their ingenuity to explore and experiment with new ways of doing things within the confines of the organization." Chris and I are sons of an artist who quit his job to pursue his dream of painting. That lesson stuck.

"Real learning is a cycle of questioning, experimenting and reflecting. It’s how we convert curiosity into an innovative solution." This is a theme we constantly re-enforce with our clients—analytics is a journey of discovery. The end goal isn't a report or analysis, it is a step that will reveal new understanding and help you ask a better question next time.

"Elegant solutions often come from customers—get out more and live in their world.... go look and see to fully grasp the situation; then, and only then, define the problem and design the appropriate solution." We have been a proponent of looking at the raw data that describes individual customer behaviors--alternatively, there are companies like Lextant that specialize in helping businesses get closer to understanding customer needs.

"Focus on clear and present needs, or your great ideas remain just that. Make sure you’re concentrating on a real need. Don’t confuse an unarticulated need with a non-existent one. Don’t attempt to manufacture a need." This is the fundamental problem with many data warehouse and business intelligence projects--in their attempt to be comprehensive, they minimize current needs and frequently miss the mark on future needs.

"Pictures and images connect people to thoughts and goals and help turn valuable ideas into action. So get graphic. Whenever you can, wherever you can, start building a visual element into your thinking... Digging into relevant data helps fight the dangers of bias, convention and instinct. There’s nothing better to help make the break with comfortable patterns than solid evidence. " Preaching to the choir.

"Be-all, end-all, feature-rich solutions almost always miss the mark. Because they’re over-scoped and too complex. They’re usually proof that we lack real insight into our customer’sdesires. Complexity destroys value, which is what matters most to the customer. The most elegant solutions always seem blazingly simple." Isn't that just the way it is with many BI solutions?

Sunday mornings at my house:

Wife: "What do you want for dinners this week?"

Me: "Dunno. Something easy."

Wife: "Think of something."

Me: "Bratwursts?"

Wife: "Something real."

...

And so it goes, every weekend. Making the weekly grocery list is one of those tedious tasks that feels like an unavoidable mallet to the brain.

My friend Cathy decided to do something about it—she built an Excel tool that helps her pick dinners and automatically build a list of ingredients. This Recipe Manager is a fine feat of Excel engineering and she has been kind enough to let us share it with our readers.

Step 1: Use the handy recipe input sheet to add new items to your list. Tip: Only add ingredients that you don't normally stock.

Step 2: Select from drop down lists of dinner options--one for each day of the week. The dinner suggestions area at the bottom randomly selects a set of recipes to provide some fresh ideas.

Step 3: Print out your automatically generated shopping list.

Download Cathy's Recipe Manager here. It may just free up some quality time.

Many Eyes: IBM's collaborative visualization

Fernando Vargas' vision comes to light.

Sean McGrath offers a brilliant description of the relationship between spreadsheets and database applications. No commentary required.

"Think of your centralized database applications as a set of large rocks. Their great strength is their solidity. Their great weakness is their lack of flexibility. Think of spreadsheets as the water that flows over and around the rocks. Their great strength is their flexibility. Their great weakness is their lack of solidity. The easiest route to the far side of a rock is to be like water and flow over or around it, rather than to change the nature of the rock."

"Would you mind repeating that more slowly?"

"No problem", said Master Foo. "Database applications have rigid structure and rigid behavior. If a business process exactly matches the structure and behavior then nothing inhibits the flow of business processes. As soon as the rigidity becomes a problem, users will seek to find the quickest way around the rigidity. This often takes the form of spreadsheets that supplement the data and the behavior of the centralized systems. Spreadsheets do not involve getting the IT department to do anything. Nobody even needs to be told. The spreadsheets can be stored locally. Individuals can set up their spreadsheets to model how they themselves work. They have complete control."

A cold sweat formed on the brow of the CIO.

"Over time, more and more key information lives primarily in the spreadsheets rather than in the centralized data stores. In advanced cases of this phenomenon, it is the expense centralized enterprise applications that can be destroyed without causing a noise at board level because individual, local PCs hold the true enterprise data in an amorphous assembly of spreadsheets."

(Via James Webster at The News Before the News)

The last mile of business analytics is poorly paved. Most of the effort and investment has been put into gathering, centralizing and warehousing data; relatively little time is spent on thoughtful, creative analysis and ensuring that results are communicated into the minds of the decision-makers. It is this last piece that may matter the most.

We can construct engaging stories from the data and put together winning PowerPoint decks, but the window of opportunity to communicate our results always seems frighteningly narrow. Weeks of analysis and synthesis can get crammed into a single 30-minute agenda-item. The cramming part isn't so much the problem (it demands focus on the key results—I am more concerned about the fleeting attention of an audience that has a dozen other priorities, is awash in information, and may be data-phobic. Not to mention the risk of getting derailed by conversations about the data sources and statistical significance.

How can we share our analytical results in a way that will stick to the distracted mind of an executive? Moreover, is our obsession with top management misplaced when insights about the business should be spread to all levels of an organization?

One place to start is to consider how to break through the cluster of information with creative communication techniques. Here are a few ideas—I'd be interested in hearing your ideas or success stories:

• Catch them in their downtime. At one client, we created flyers that showed the results from a customer survey and posted them in the bathroom stalls under the title "Learn as you go." We gave a captured audience something to read. Maybe we were too timid—why not go all the way with custom-printed toilet paper?
• A new format. When traditional slides seem to numb your audience, maybe a new information format is in order. Try a science-fair type poster, a web page, or a short book (check out self-publishing with Lulu). We once created a movie (Windows Media only) to show customer behaviors; a year later I got a request to show the movie in order to re-establish the key message. That's sticky.
• One-page summary. Provide your audience with something to take away that summarizes your key messages. You might hand out (or stuff mail boxes with) a laminated one-pager with your most important framework and results. A colorful summary that begs to be thumbtacked to an office wall is better than a 40-page black-and-white deck that begs to be thrown out.
• 10' display. It seems to be in vogue for companies to have big TVs in the lobby to stream corporate propaganda to the minions. Reach out to corporate communications to see if you can get into the program.

Poor old Mac Excel, it just don't get no respect.

It's different enough from PC Excel to strike uncanny valley fears into the unwitting. The next versions will exclude built-in VBA much to the chagrin of the Mac business faithful. The uproar reminds me of when Lotus announced it would pull LotusScript, a VBA-like language, out of its Notes program. People were openly revolting (although nothing was quite as revolting as Notes development).

So, if you don't have Parallels or the like, it's pretty much the only choice you've got on OS X. Sure, you can use Open Office, but that comes with its own peculiarities and incompatibilities.

One tip I'd like to share is how to silence this much maligned program. If you're using anything other than the built-in speakers on your Mac, you'll find that people in other parts of the office tend to jump out of their chairs when you hit Save. Mac Excel blings, clicks, and whirs with wild abandon.

You're just one click away from the sound of silence and passing this along is almost always met with "oh, you can do that?" squeaks of delight.

Click here to download our much-delayed Excel training document. It is chock-full of tips, tricks, and exercises to sharpen your Excel skills.The training covers many of the areas discussed in our post on "Essential Excel Skills." Here's the outline:

1. Getting started

a. Keyboarding

b. Absolute and relative references

2. Data and functions

a. Find and replace

b. Date and time

c. Functions

d. Text functions

e. Vlookup

f. Data filters

3. Presenting data

a. In-cell graphics

b. Conditional formatting

c. Chart Exercises

Please share your thoughts on weaknesses or gaps in this document. Better yet, send us additional training content that we can include in the next version of this file.