With the 2024 NFL season underway, I want to share the changes that I most recommend for improving the NFL. Many of these would make the game more exciting and add strategy to the game. Strategy and Rule Changes: Goal Line On Side Possession: If a team wants the ball after a kickoff, let them take it at their goal line, maybe even on third down. No more bouncy balls from on-side kicks. If you can drive 99 yards, hats off to you, man. I’d like to see a coach swallow that call. You can still do an on-side kick, but if you want the ball, take it and run the field. 3 Point Conversion: If you ..read more

The wave of Spanglish has hit advertisers in recent years. Dos Equis invites its customers to “Keep it Interesante,” while taco fans at Taco Bell “Live Más.”       Home Depot and other retailers have adopted a near bilingual policy in stores. Smart move! Interestingly, linguists report that a new language is evolving in South Florida, one that merges grammatical structures from Spanish with English words, and transforms English words into Spanglish when convenient, like in the use of lunche for almuerzo (lunch) or furnatura for muebles (furniture). Just as salsa, mojo, amig ..read more

Recently, I was reflecting on the thousands of students that have been in my classes, at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and now at Foster School of Business, University of Washington. Over the past 18 years, over 4000 students took my very popular Analytics Consulting Lab. In just the last month, I have had the immense pleasure of connecting with many alumni of my classes. It was really great to hear about their success in life, family and career. I am proud of their accomplishments. Many asked me questions, asked for advice, or simply wanted to bounce something ..read more

The first touches of Autumn are detectable in the Pacific Northwest. In the coming weeks, the maples will redden to welcome many students back to campus, including thousands of students for the first time. It is a time for growth, exploration, challenges, difficulty, and discovery. It can bring anxiety, confusion, loneliness,  and conflict, too. This year, I have added some (not so hard) but very impactful things to address the many challenges seen in colleges. I hope my thoughts help you, a loved one, a friend, or student get ready for coming back to campus!   Attend and Be Pres ..read more

Recently, I caught up with a friend that I have known for 30 years. Today, we are both raising our children. In the 1980’s, we were teenagers in Florida collecting football and baseball cards, going to coin shops to find “rare” or different foreign coins, and of course we were listening to music on records (vinyls for those younger than 30) and CDs. We compared how our childhoods were different than our children’s childhoods. For sure, our children have many more options, opportunities, and avenues to the world than we enjoyed. However, we noted that the young people of today do not have t ..read more

With the 2023 NFL season underway, I want to share the changes that I most recommend for improving the NFL. Many of these would make the game more exciting and add strategy to the game. Strategy and Rule Changes: Goal Line On Side Possession: If a team wants the ball after a kickoff, let them take it at their goal line, maybe even on third down. No more bouncy balls from on-side kicks. If you can drive 99 yards, hats off to you, man. I’d like to see a coach swallow that call. You can still do an on-side kick, but if you want the ball, take it and run the field. 3 Point Conversion: If you ..read more

We are now more reliant than ever on digital systems to manage and control physical systems. We enjoy using systems like Ring to manage the front door and Nest to manage the HVAC system. Even my irrigation system has a digital interface and an app that makes turning on the sprinklers a breeze. Companies, of course, rely on digital system and rules to make decisions in increasingly impactful ways. When digital systems find anomalies, like fraud, the recovery process kicks in, automatically, often without a sanity or statistical check to examine if that anomaly is even believable or should b ..read more

Companies often grapple with the challenges of respecting customer privacy. Although most firms do not seek to cause or do harm, data breaches, inadvertent misuse of data, and unauthorized publishing of data seem to ultimately happen. Data on a social media site, on a shopping site, or from your gym membership may seem sensitive. But, the most sensitive data is surely one’s own, unique DNA. Now, DNA is being publishing, shared, and studied in great ways. Over 1 million Americans have shared their DNA with genealogical sites and many hundreds more do so each week. Researchers published in t ..read more

With the college football in full swing, it is worth a look to see how the teams stack-up, not based on rankings, but based on fan loyalty. Big Data and Data Visualization help us with this and lead to some interesting insights. College football also offers us a great opportunity to look at the Big Data of fandom and the business of college football and even that of universities. Building on my post that looked at NFL fan allegiance by location (see first graphic above), I thought looking at some data visualization of college football allegiance would tell us a bit about who roots for whic ..read more

It seems that 2023 will be go down as the year of AI. We see thousands of new jobs, billions in investment, and a great deal or excitement in how AI will be used in business. In such applications, the focus is often to 1) Replace costly workers 2) Make costly workers more efficient or 3) Achieve greater profitability, given some marketing opportunity. These conditions are not directly seen in a  normal person's life, so it is not surprising to read that personal use of ChatGPT is declining. There are many things we normally do in daily life that would benefit from AI (or at least some ..read more