Leading indicators might include the daily monitors we use to run our breakfast factory, from machine downtime records to an index of customer satisfaction—both of which can tell us if problems lie down the road. A generally applicable example of a “window” cut into the black box is the linearity indicator. In the figure below, we provide one for the college recruiting process. Plotted here is the number of college graduates who have accepted our offers versus the month of the year. If all went ideally, we would move along the straight line that would yield our hiring target for the semester
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