In his book Innumeracy: mathematical illiteracy and its consequences from 1990, John Allen Paulos writes about the common inability among people – even in important positions – to do simple math. While society looks upon illiteracy as a big problem, and inability to spell correctly is shameful for the individual, nobody seems to be troubled by innumeracy. For example: Nobody says “corporation with a C or Korporation with a K, I don’t care how you spell it in the report as long as you have it done in time”. As a contrast, quotes similar to the following is not unheard of: “A billion or a trillion, I don’t care how many of them you have detected, just file the report in time”. Just ask your self – are you fully aware of the difference between a “billion” and “trillion”? If you are not, make sure you become so.
James Taylor writes about exactly this on SmartDataCollective.com (a TeraData community site) on April 4, 2010, in a post called Don’t rely on your staff’s ability to do math:
I often tell folks that one of the benefits of decision management is that it enables analytic decision making – that is decisions based on accurate analysis of data about what works and what does not – even by people who don’t have any analytic skill.[…] And this is important because most people don’t have these skills! Presenting them with data and expecting them to accurately use it is just not reasonable. […] Please, embed the analytics, don’t rely on your staff’s ability to do math.
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