Nothing irritates me more than seeing a slide filled with decimals. How does it matter whether an open rate of emails was 11.43% — instead of just 11? Does it really make a difference if growth is 23.71% — why not just say 24%? And yet, the world seems to have decided that every unit – before or after a decimal point is equally important and must be shown. Watch a slide with 50 digits and not a single one of them becomes memorable. The mental effort to read 76.53 is so much more than just 76, and yet few get it – because Excel or a calculator can provide an endless flow of decimals, the belief is that every fractional unit matters.
While the decimals don’t matter, the commas do! So many times I see a string like 3456321 and I have to then look closely and mentally insert the commas to get a sense of the largeness. And in India, where to put the comma is also a lingering question – lakhs and crores or millions and billions. I keep telling my colleagues to show the most significant digits and then round off. Does it matter if we sent 19,761,891,123 emails – when there is the simpler alternative of 20 billion (and not even 19.7)?
We have too many numbers all around us – punctuated by decimals and commas, numbers which we glaze over, which we see for a fleeting moment because there is another string next to it competing for our attention! It is time for “Making Numbers Count”, as a recent book by Chip Heath and Karla Starr suggests. Each of us needs a lesson in numeracy, As the authors write: “we lose information when we don’t translate numbers into instinctive human experience. We do hard, often painstaking work to generate the right numbers to help make a good decision—but all that work is wasted if those numbers never take root in the minds of the decision makers. As lovers of numbers, we find this tragic. The work that is being done to understand the most meaningful things in the world—ending poverty, fighting disease, conveying the scale of the universe, telling a heartbroken teen how many other times they will fall in love—is being lost because of the lack of translation.”
Some of the book’s recommendations are a good place to begin:
- Simpler Is Better: Round with Enthusiasm.
- Concrete Is Better: Use Whole Numbers to Describe Whole Objects, Not Decimals, Fractions, or Percentages.
- Follow the Rules But Defer to Expertise. Rules 1 and 2 May be Trumped by Expert Knowledge.
- Recast Your Number in Different Dimensions: Try Time, Space, Distance, Money, and Pringles.
In life and in business, understanding the importance of numbers and communicating them in a way which makes it easier for others to remember matters. In Netcore, with our multiple business lines, there are plenty of numbers in our periodic reviews. What we have done is aligned everyone around a single number, the North Star Metric. For us, that is the exit MRR (monthly recurring revenue) of our Platform business.
I am reminded of a headline in a business paper which said, “XXX profit up 300%.” Read the fine print, and what the company had done was grow its profit from 1 crore to 4 crore, an almost insignificant and irrelevant increase given the revenue base of a few thousand crores!
Make it a mission to simplify the numbers around us – and communicate what matters.
