One of the best bosses I ever worked for told me this about numbers in business presentations, "I like graphs". And after attending several of his business meetings, I could understand why. A graph tells a story that a table of numbers does not.
Yes. It's damned hard, even for the practiced eye, to see a trend in a table of numbers. And trends are what competent managers need. If it's up, OK, leave it alone. If it's down, it's an opportunity for improvement and another boost to my bonus.
You can crunch the heck out of the numbers, but to produce meaningful information, you need insight into what is meaningful to the enterprise at the particular moment. The Reverend Leroy's Church of What's Happ'nin' Now!
Production numbers are no help when the enterprise needs sales.
In the wayback, I had a gig at a Tier-One automotive supplier. A senior analyst told me a story about the manager who demanded a 3-inch stack of fanfold detailing the previous day's operations. The manager looked up a few numbers from the stack, wrote them on a yellow pad along with some results from his desktop calculator. Gave the numbers to the plant manager. The analyst said "We can program those calculations". The manager replied, "Don't you dare. Don't you dare break my rice bowl! The plant manager needs me to give him those numbers!"
