When you see numerical data, remember that it was created by people: individuals or groups of people who decide which elements of the phenomena they include in published data and which they overlook and destroy. Hence, data reflects bias. A wonderful book, Relevance Lost by H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan,1 shows that there is a complicated story behind every number. These stories are hidden when they are parsed and distilled into numbers. When the stories are told, they are rich in data. The insights from the right cases are deep. Numbers that were distilled from stories offer insights
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