Let's get real or let's not play

I recently had occasion to review one of the presentations given at this year's APMP Socal Chapter Training Day. This presentation was given by Stan Balfour of Shipley Associates, and was entitled "Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play."

Perhaps at some point I'll delve into the issues that Balfour talked about in his presentation, but right now I just want to look at the title.

Because presentations are often summations of material presented elsewhere, I wondered if Balfour had written a book entitled Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play. It turned out that there is a book with that title, but that book was written by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig, and was published by FranklinCovey.

In a sense this is not a surprise, since (as I previously noted) FranklinCovey owned Shipley Associates for a few years. I don't know if Stan Balfour was with Shipley Associates during those years, but Khalsa and Illig became two of the three co-founders of the company Ninety Five 5. For those familiar with Pareto's 80-20 rule, Ninety Five 5 characterizes Pareto's theory as weak:

In the late 19th century, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto developed what is known as the 80/20 rule. His rule states that approximately 80 percent of the effects are derived from 20 percent of the causes. We take this philosophy a step further and suggest that approximately 95 percent of your results are driven by 5 percent of your efforts, hence the name Ninety Five 5.

When you consider that four of the 3,000+ posts in this blog account for more than 10% of the total pageviews, they might be right.

In case you're curious, here are the first, second, third, and fourth most popular posts in the Empoprise-BI business blog.

So far.