"Show me the money"

One of the most significant challenges in management in high-tech is communicating information; sharing perspectives on the complex, dynamic world in which we work. It's the whole process of encoding what you know in a way that makes it most likely to be effectively decoded.

As a result, I made graphical communication one of the central planks of the Systems, Leadership & Management Lab (SL&M lab) that I teach at MIT; as part of that this year the whole cohort attended Edward Tufte's program. In an interesting development, he's been appointed to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel:

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with two goals:

• To provide transparency in relation to the use of Recovery-related funds
• To prevent and detect fraud, waste, and mismanagement

I hope that what comes out of this is fascinating and informative graphical insights into where the money's going.
Minard's diagram of Napoleon's march on MoscowThis famous graphic shows six dimensions on a single page:

• Geography: rivers, cities and battles are named and placed according to their occurrence on a regular map
• The army’s course: the path’s flow follows the way in and out that Napoleon followed
• The army’s direction: indicated by the colour of the path, gold leading into Russia, black leading out of it
• The number of soldiers remaining: the path gets successively narrower, a plain reminder of the campaigns human toll, as each millimetre represents 10.000 men
• Temperature: the freezing cold of the Russian winter on the return trip is indicated at the bottom, in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur (water freezes at 0° réaumur, boils at 80° réaumur)
• Time: in relation to the temperature indicated at the bottom, from right to left, starting 24 October (pluie, i.e. ‘rain’) to 7 December (-27°)

Comments

[Ritesh]

Saw the posting yesterday.. really hoping and looking forward to seeing some meaningful data presented to Tufte's standards coming from the panel.

A note about the SLaM Lab, the focus on graphical presentation I think was priceless, no other course delves this topic specially in the context of a real strategy consulting project. We all suffer on a daily basis from the lack of having data presented in a meaningful way..

[Desmond Pieri]

Michael, I've always loved the brilliance of Minard's Napoleon work. But with all the technology we have today, why has no one created a better work?

Or is the availability of technology in fact the problem? Is it that we laymen have the tools to created our own graphics and we just never can do as well as Minard?

When I was first in business, if we wanted to created a graph for an executive presentation, we had to call the design department and professionally trained designers would listen to what we wanted to present and then they'd come up with the graphic. Today, we just do the graphic ourself. Maybe Minard would have had some competition if we left design to the designers.

(Side benefit: I met my wife her first day on the job in the design department at my company!)

Des