

Business, Revenue, Whatever: Just Hack - jasonb05
http://neverreadpassively.blogspot.com/2008/04/business-revenue-whatever-just-hack.html

======
timr
Great post. If I ever start a blog, the first entries are going to be on
lessons that can be directly adapted from research to the world of business.

So many people fall in love with their ideas, and seem to forget that things
like business plans and revenue projections are just _models_ , and that
models are utterly meaningless without supporting data. You can plan and
scheme and predict your quarterly revenue to the penny, but that effort
doesn't affect _reality_ in the slightest.

The grant proposal is the analogue to this process in the academic world.
Virtually every researcher knows how to write one, and anyone who has will
tell you that the game is equivalent -- you're presenting future research
(stuff that hasn't been done yet, and that will, in all likelihood, fail
completely) in a way that makes it seem as if success is inevitable. (To make
the analogy complete, you're doing all of this so that you can beg someone for
money!)

There are many ways to write a grant, of course, and you always try to include
as much real data as you can from past experiments. Fundamentally, however,
what you're really creating is a very detailed, very technical bit of science
_fiction_. Moreover, if you ask 10 researchers if they believe in the details
of what they said in their last grant proposal, 9 of them will laugh in your
face (and the last one will tell you that their research has already moved in
a different direction).

This is one area where the business world has a lot to learn from science and
technology: data trumps all. The more time you spend _planning_ , the less
time you spend _doing_ , and when you're not doing, you're not generating the
data you need to refine your plan.

(Digression: I think this would be better understood if business majors had to
take science classes once in a while.)

