How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

by Douglas W. Hubbard

best-known example of such a “Fermi question” was Fermi asking his students to estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago. His students—science and engineering majors—would begin by saying that they could not possibly know anything about such a quantity. Of course, some solutions would be to simply do a count of every piano tuner perhaps by looking up advertisements, checking with a licensing agency of some sort, and so on. But Fermi was trying to teach his students how to solve problems where the ability to confirm the results would not be so easy. He wanted them to figure out that they knew something about the quantity in question. Fermi would start by asking them to estimate other things about pianos and piano tuners that, while still uncertain, might seem easier to estimate. These included the current population of Chicago (a little over 3 million in the 1930s to 1950s), the average number of people per household (two or three), the share of households with regularly tuned pianos (not more than 1 in 10 but not less than 1 in 30), the required frequency of tuning (perhaps once a year, on average), how many pianos a tuner could tune in a day (four or five, including travel time), and how many days a year the tuner works (say, 250 or so). The result would be computed: