Part of my job at Ranker is to talk to other companies about our data. While people often talk about how “big data” is revolutionizing everything, the reality of the data marketplace is that it still largely revolves around sales, marketing, and advertising. Huge infrastructures exist to make sure that the most optimal ad for the right product gets to the right person, leveraging as much data as possible. For example, I recently presented at a data conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, which meant that I spent some time on their website. For the past few weeks, long after the conference, I’ve been getting ads specifically for the Westin St. Francis on various websites. At some level, this is an impressive use of data, but at another level, it’s a failure, as I’m no longer in the market for a hotel room. The data to solve this problem is out there as someone could have tracked my visitation of the conference website, understood the date of the conference, and better understood my intent in visiting the Westin. However, this level of analysis doesn’t scale well for an ad that costs pennies, and so nobody does this level of behavioral targeting.
I bring up this story because I believe this illustrates a difference between how people who think of themselves as businesspeople and people who think of themselves as technologists often think. When talking about Ranker data, I often see this dichotomy. People who are more traditionally business minded want a clear business reason to use data, while people who think of themselves as technologists seem more open to trying to envision a world where data does all sorts of neat things that data should be used for. For example, I recently graphed opinions about beer, illustrating that Miller Lite drinkers were closer to Guinness drinkers than to Chimay drinkers. As a technologist, I’m certain that a world will soon exist where bartenders can use data about me and others like me (e.g. the beer graph), to recommend a beer. I don’t worry as much about the immediate path from the conception of such data to monetization. I know that the beer graph should exist and I’m happy to help contribute to it, confident of my vision of the future.
This division between people who think like businesspeople and people who think like technologists is important for anyone who does business development or business to business sales, especially for those of us in the technology world where the lines are often blurry. Mark Zuckerberg is a CEO, but clearly he thinks like a technologist. My guess is that a lot of the CTOs of big companies actually think more like businesspeople than technologists. If I were trying to sell Mark Zuckerberg on something, I would try to sell him on how whatever I was offering could make a huge difference to something he cared about. I would sell the dream. But if I were selling a more traditional businessperson, I would try to sell the benefits versus the costs. I would have a detailed plan and sell the details.
I actually have a bit of data from YourMorals.org to support this assertion. We have started collecting data on visitors’ professions and below I compare businesspeople to technologists on two of the Big Five personality dimensions that are said to underlie much of personality: Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience. As you can see, businesspeople are more conscientious (detail oriented, fastidious, responsible), while technologists score higher on openness which is indicative of enjoying exploring new ideas and thinking of new possibilities.
The reality is that every business needs a balance between those who are detail oriented and precise (Conscientious) and those who think about a vision for the future (Openness to Experience). Often, technologists who start a company will eventually hire professional businesspeople who provide this balance (e.g. Sheryl Sandberg or Eric Schmidt). Clearly, the best sales pitch will be both detailed and forward thinking. However, if you’re talking to someone and have limited time and attention, considering whether you are speaking to someone who is more of a businessperson or more of a technologist may give you better insight into how to frame your pitch.
- Ravi Iyer
ps. Crossposted on Zenzi Communications‘ blog here, which is using a data driven approach to improving communications strategies.
How to Prevent Mental Illness: Help others with their stressful life events
December 15th, 2012 by Ravi IyerI’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile, not just in response to the recent tragedy in Connecticut, but anytime I read an article about homelessness or people who are mentally disturbed. Many people wonder what we can do to address the mentally ill, whether it is to prevent them from engaging in violence or prevent them from lapsing into homelessness. Medical professionals have many tools to help those with chemical imbalances, but the reality that the medical model of mental illness fails to capture, is that many (though not all) mental illnesses are qualitatively different than many physical illnesses. Mental illnesses are often matters of degree rather than of the categorical presence or absence of a condition, despite the categorical nature of mental health diagnoses. You either have AIDS or Malaria or you don’t, whereas many of us have some degree of anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, hyperactivity and other conditions, rather than being clearly normal or ill. Because we often think of mental illness using this medical model, we often think two things that are often untrue:
1. We believe that we can’t do anything about mental illness and only experts can help.
2. We believe that the mentally ill are “others” and that the people we know are categorically different.
Sometimes people break. All types of people break, but you can help. On occasion, I have spent some time at Dorothy’s Place, a shelter in Salinas where they care for a lot of the local homeless and the director would often tell visiting students about how people break. Imagine being a teenager who is dropped off at the shelter because your parents don’t want you any more. Imagine spending day after day in Iraq, looking around corners for snipers and explosives, one of which happened to kill several of your friends, and then trying to enter normal society without retaining the vestiges of that experience. Some mentally ill individuals certainly have brain chemistry issues, but others are people who would otherwise live relatively normal lives, save for an experience or series of experiences that break them.
What are these stressful life experiences? Below is a common, though perhaps outdated (from 1967!) ranked list of common life stressors that psychologists sometimes use to diagnose how much life stress people are undergoing, based on which of these events have been experienced recently.
How can you prevent mental illness? Many of your friends have the potential for mental illness and when they undergo the inevitable stresses of life, they need the support of their friends and family, before things get serious enough for a medical diagnosis and a prescription. You can be that support to the people around you, especially when you notice events such as divorce, breakups, and death that are especially strong stressors.
Consider the times in your life when you felt like you might break. Perhaps they involved the loss of someone you cared about, whether through a death or through a breakup. As an ultra-social species, these are deeply painful events. Consider how you got through those events. Why didn’t you break? I know that in my own life, the support of my friends and family helped me in those times. It is that social support that perhaps explains why mental illness is more prevalent in individualistic societies and less so in collectivist nations.
How can you prevent mental illness? Be the change you want to see in the world and help those around you when they go through life’s inevitable ups and downs. When you notice one of the events in the above list in someone’s life, even someone you aren’t that close to, make the effort to go out of your way to show them that you care and they are not alone.
- Ravi Iyer