CHAPTER 3
Manipulating Your Data: Put Your Stake in the Ground

Many years ago, I was in a situation at work where one of the leaders and I did not see eye to eye on something. He would go and tell his people one thing, and I would go and tell my people something different. He was basing his argument on his gut, and I was basing my argument on information that I had collected from data. I remember specifically the day that he approached me after hearing one of his own employees spout out what I had been saying instead of what he was proposing. Needless to say, he wasn’t happy, and he thought I had been weaseling my way into his team’s heads, which simply wasn’t true.

This leader came right up to me, puffed his chest out at me, and he basically told me to quit going behind his back and telling his people to disagree with him. I had never done such a thing. They just started to look at the same data I had already looked at, and they began to draw the same conclusions...