I recently pondered the value of a great analyst to a mid-sized public company (revenues around $1-2 billion.) Based on my experience at multiple companies, I estimate the productivity, typical project benefits, and costs of an average, good and great analyst. The differences in the return to a company are staggering with great analysts yielding double the ROI of a good analyst and triple the ROI of an average analyst!
My conservative estimates of analyst project results (annual value to the firm) are $460k for average analysts, $1.2m for good analysts and $3.1m for great analysts!
There are two primary drivers behind the much higher value produced by great analysts (illustrated in the following graph):
Executive Summary
Which “green” activities are consumers performing in their everyday lives? Activities that-
– Save them money?
– Are easy to do?
– Are the most beneficial to the environment?
– Some combination of the three?
By combining insights from a recent survey of consumer behavior with expert opinion on green activities I found that:
– Activities that experts rank as the most beneficial for the environment are not always performed frequently by consumers.
– Economic benefit to the consumer is a stronger predictor of frequently-performed activities than environmental benefit.
– However, convenience to the consumer is the best predictor of green behavior!
Decision-makers for sustainability programs can tailor this method to their particular location by:
– Compiling a list of green activities specific to their region.
– Surveying local consumers and experts.
– Altering which dimensions are included in assessing the importance of various green activities.
“Newcomer” communities can maximize the impact of launching their green programs by:
– Prioritizing activities that are convenient and economical for the consumer.
– Motivating consumers with educational programs and incentives.
– Waiting until the environmental program has gotten off the ground before encouraging activities that are low in convenience and economic benefit- unless they can be financially subsidized.
After reading several articles, I decided to add my help for wayward singles seeking the right city to call home. Following in the footsteps of work in the New York Times and Sperling’s BestPlaces, I seek to create a visually intuitive presentation about the “best” place to be single. In particular, I seek to find the best cities based on concentration of singles and offer insights about cities with better odds for women and men- with some surprising results!
I hope this is a fun topic for everyone and a useful reference for some!
I love exploring the possible intersections of technology and information, with the intent to improve or expedite knowledge sharing. One of my recent epiphanies was related to the difficulty of efficiently reviewing resumes, especially technical resumes. Recruiters and managers spend huge amounts of time reviewing resumes (at least they used too) and automated tools have … Read more
Effectively Communicating Survey Data: Beyond Text Tables and Pie Charts A review of an article from Investor’s Business Daily and recommended improvements is covered in this presentation. The topic of the article is “Obama Terrorism Grade”, a summary of a survey conducted in early April, 2009 by Technometrica Market Intelligence. The Results are summarized … Read more
Whether you are a grad student, business analyst, statistician, or even a long time user of SAS software- SAS for Dummies (available at Amazon) offers quick access to a vast survey of practical knowledge using the new and exciting world of SAS 9. If you are using the latest version of SAS Learning Edition (version … Read more
To all you long-time users of SAS out there, why are you continuing to write the arcane code required to make graphs with SAS programming? I remember the pain of scanning the nearly 1,000 pages of GRAPH manuals to locate just the right options to tweak my graphs for business presentations. Many days, I wanted to ditch it all and just fall back to Harvard Graphics for all of my graphs (yes, this was quite some time ago!) Consider using SAS Enterprise Guide and save yourself many sleepless nights and get the easy ability to export to Office seamlessly.
A recent post on SAS-L asks about using EG in a group that has used SAS for quite some time. Here are my thoughts, if you have others feel free to post them as comments!
It’s interesting to note that Business Objects growth rate slowed by half this past year (down from 14% to 7% growth/year.) SAS’s rate accelerated (up from 13 to 17%) and Microsoft (up from 25 to 28%) are the few large vendors seeing acceleration in growth rates. It’s possible SAS could take the number one spot in the next year or two
This book is a well written and succinct introduction to SAS programming and basic statistical analysis. Using just PC SAS with BASE and STAT, you can pick up the basics of programming with SAS for data access, data manipulation with the DATA step and functions, basic SAS PROCs, controlling output appearance, leveraging MACRO capabilities of SAS, basic statistical analysis, and program debugging. With SAS Learning Edition and this book you can quickly master the basics of the SAS language.
