When the economy is growing and consumers happily spend all their money, “eye-catching”, dubious “professional-looking” charts seem to make sense in the grand scheme of a resource-wasting economy. But under recession, and on the threshold of a long economic Winter, those miscast charts are just bad jokes that should be banished from every book, every magazine, every meeting room.
In a recession, “do more with less” is everyone’s motto. Cut jobs. Cut travel expenses. Make people work harder.
Make people work better. In an information economy, “better” is better than “harder”. Make sure people use their primary tools efficiently. I wrote about how inefficient a beginner Excel user can be. This is one of those hidden costs that no one seems to care about, except perhaps Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe, who sees PowerPoint as an example of waste.
That’s why Tufte is basically right, and so is Stephen Few and everyone who believes that information visualization is not a futile exercise of impression management with the sole purpose of showing off canned effects in a PowerPoint presentation. Tufte advocates a simple set of rules for better information visualization – the corporate world loves to do exactly the opposite. Until now. But can organizations afford to be inefficient (= lower return on investment) when dealing with expensive data? Can a lean organization leave junk in its management reports and presentations?
I know, the economy will not grow again just because of better business information visualization. But take a visualization rich report like these ones, imagine an eye-catching-flying-3D-pie-charts version and answer this simple question: when in recession, which one would you choose?
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