Can knowing what kind of thinker you are make you more productive, happier and smarter? — Last week a friend sent me a New Yorker article about how different peoples’ brains process information, and it was revelatory for me. The article said that different people tend to be either ‘verbal’ or ‘visual’ thinkers. Verbal thinkers do most of their thinking through inner dialogue whereas visual thinkers…

Depends where you live. Now that second quarter GDP numbers have been released, no one who has been paying attention should be too surprised that we have now had 2 successive negative quarters. Historically we’d have unanimous consensus at this moment that we’re in the grips of a recession, except for one confounding data…

The Restaurant Economic Model is Broken — Technology Can Fix It — As the country starts to emerge from over a year of Covid hibernation, the size, shape and dynamics of the restaurant industry looks rather different from what went into the crisis. Some restaurants are quickly discovering that reopening their doors and playing by the pre-pandemic game plan is simply not…

A Retrospective View from the Top of the Hype Cycle — While doing some research the other day I stumbled across a modified copy of a presentation I did at a Restaurant Marketing Executives conference right when “Big Data” was at the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It’s hard to believe that was 7 years ago, and it’s been 5 years…

September CPI Runs Hot Before OPEC Production Cap The September CPI report was not good news for the economy. Headline CPI came in higher than expected at 8.2% (barely budging from 8.3% last month). Food away from home CPI ticked up to the highest level since September 1981. Looking forward…

A look at the first decade of the ‘sexy’ data science century I’m now well into my third decade in the business of using data for insights in decision making, and while much has changed over that time, many would be surprised at how much has not. Or perhaps, more to the point, how much value is being rediscovered after periods of…

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Mark Twain It may just be a mental block, but I can’t for the life of me think of anything that rhymes with stagflation. I can think of a few things that rhyme with transitory, maybe that’s why that adjective lingered for…

It’s time to reshape the economics of a historically unprofitable industry Even before Covid-19 wrought havoc on the Restaurant industry there was a simmering struggle across the industry over the increasingly difficult unit-level economics that operators were facing. With an average profit margin of just 5% every blip of operating…