Magazine Manager Makes Marketing Matter

It's great to hear about other businesses and to use their experiences to help get a new perspective on your own. John Griffin, president of the National Geographic Magazine Group, gave a speech early this month that is fuller with business wisdom than many books. If you change publisher to company and magazine to product or service, virtually all of the advice adapts beautifully. Here are a few points he made, relating to measuring how a company is doing, that I particularly enjoyed:

• live in a fact based world


• make numbers pass the common sense test


• too much data is as bad as too little data; act now

Just these few points could help most corporations make more sense out of the mind-numbing data analyses they do. I'd add one other: mistakes happen - it's not learning from them that is the problem.