Business, Revenue, Whatever: Just Hack

Great post. If I ever start a blog, the first entries are going to be on lessons that can be directly adapted from research to the world of business.

So many people fall in love with their ideas, and seem to forget that things like business plans and revenue projections are just models, and that models are utterly meaningless without supporting data. You can plan and scheme and predict your quarterly revenue to the penny, but that effort doesn't affect reality in the slightest.

The grant proposal is the analogue to this process in the academic world. Virtually every researcher knows how to write one, and anyone who has will tell you that the game is equivalent -- you're presenting future research (stuff that hasn't been done yet, and that will, in all likelihood, fail completely) in a way that makes it seem as if success is inevitable. (To make the analogy complete, you're doing all of this so that you can beg someone for money!)

There are many ways to write a grant, of course, and you always try to include as much real data as you can from past experiments. Fundamentally, however, what you're really creating is a very detailed, very technical bit of science fiction. Moreover, if you ask 10 researchers if they believe in the details of what they said in their last grant proposal, 9 of them will laugh in your face (and the last one will tell you that their research has already moved in a different direction).

This is one area where the business world has a lot to learn from science and technology: data trumps all. The more time you spend planning, the less time you spend doing, and when you're not doing, you're not generating the data you need to refine your plan.

(Digression: I think this would be better understood if business majors had to take science classes once in a while.)