For example ... GDP / GNP

The measurement of economic growth is one important metric for the capital markets ... but the metric has become quite meaningless. GDP is Gross Domestic Product very similar to GNP which is Gross National Product. Product would normally be an outcome, but in modern GDP speak, however, anything and everything goes into the product ... including profits with no value and costs with no product. It is little wonder that economic incentives encourage unsustainable behavior!

Capital market performance and money wealth have been used as a proxy for socio-economic performance. Profit and stock price growth has been the primary goal of private and corporate enterprise with little attention paid to the impact on society as a whole. Excessive reliance on computer models, simulation and statistics with too little validation is a formula for catastrophe. A good part of economic data is based on small surveys and a lot of statistics. This system gives good results at low cost in a stable environment, but falls apart whenever there are changes, and especially disruptive changes. Modern financial accounting has failed to get money capital allocated efficiently to solve the world's critical issues ... endemic poverty ... poor health ... lack of education ... basic services ... etc.

Production Reports at Southern States, Inc.

This story illustrates the vital importance of timely information. Most of my career I have been associated with corporate accounting, consulting, planning and the analysis of performance. I have not done many line management assignments ... but in this case some years back I was appointed VP Manufacturing for Southern States Inc, a manufacturing company making air-break switches for the electric utility industry during a reorganization to improve the company's results.

The company had orders, but the factory was a bottleneck ... and we had neither the time nor the money to invest in expanded manufacturing facilities. We had to do better with what we had. For years the factory production report had been written up and distributed every day around 10 am ... informing everyone of the production numbers for the day before ... a fairly standard practice! I changed this to give management a report at 8.30 am (the factory got started at 7.30 am) about the anticipated production for the day ... today, not yesterday! By 9 am the support staff were deployed fixing problems that would improve performance today! The factory always beat its anticipated production ... and the factory production almost doubled without any major capital investment to expand the capacity!

When and where example: Malaria ... Vector Control

Example: Okehampton in England I grew up in Okehampton ... a small rural market town in the southwest of England. In 1935 it had a population of around 3,500. In the 1950s the population was something around 4,200. Back in the 11th century when the Doomsday Book was written up after the Norman conquest, Okehampton had a population of around 600 and was an important frontier town. Things changed ... but the place has kept on going.

CA has a focus on community. CA recognizes that there are big differences between places ... and even similar places have a myriad of subtle differences. Focus on the place ... gives clarity at the community level. At the national level, it is, perhaps, possible to understand something about the “state” of the national economy, but rather little about how and why the economy is in this state.

It is possible to do management by walking around at the community level ... and there is no need to rely on sophisticated survey techniques and statistics that have been popularized in academia and research institutes and provide surprisingly unreliable management information. Community level data start to tell something or real importance ... and it becomes possible to see what are the factors that have resulted in the state of the community. If something in the data is surprising ... data at the community level helps to pin-point what caused this and why and how this came about.

Some communities are too big and complex to be easy to understand ... in which case the neighborhood may be a better level for detailed data. Common sense applies. In some cases it may be appropriate to get data at the block level. In high density urban settings, the block may still be quite a large population, and the economic activities quite complex.

Community is a place ... and all communities should “add up” to a larger place, that my be a district, or a state, or a country. In this perspective of community there is no spatial overlap. Within a community there may also be neighborhoods ... and within neighborhoods also blocks.

Community may also be based on a group interest ... an affinity group. This may overlap the community defined by geographic area. A note of caution ... the “roll-up” or aggregation of affinity groups is complex and should be done carefully and rarely used as a national or global aggregate.

When and where example: Malaria ... Vector Control

The mosquito has a short life span ... but the malaria population grows fast when conditions are favorable. Killing mosquito larva is an effective way to limit the mosquito population, but larvacides are expensive. The cost of source control is minimized without reducing effectiveness when larvaciding is done in the right place and at the right time.

Killing adult mosquitoes can be done using ultra low volume (ULV) spraying ... but it is most cost effective when spraying is done only where and when it is needed. Data that shows the stage of larva development ... and the size and location of emerging mosquito populations collected today ... determines what should be done and where in the next 24 hours. The is a spatial element and a time element. Today's data determines what we do tomorrow!