Title: Performance Makeup Studio

In my country we recently had the national election. What amazes me is that all the political parties are so positive about the results.  Each party claim to be the winner. Quotes like "we improved compared to the last poll", "we improved compared to last election", "we improved in the western part of the country", "we are the winners."  All found something positive to focus on when commenting the result of the election.  

I also find this pattern in business life. Most managers are too ashamed to report poor performance, so they request that the financial department write a story that is not representing the real truth. I once met with a group of oil companies where all of them claimed to be performing better than the rest of the group. To get a better understanding of what was right I had two options:

Option 1:
I needed to update my knowledge about statistics - can all be better than average?

Option 2:
They all visited their company’s "performance makeup studio" and made the performance story unrecognizable.

Author : Tor Inge Vasshus

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