(no subject)
Last night I dreamt that I was Superman. Not that I was like him, but that I *was* him. Especially ironic considering the fact that I was sick the past few days.
Everyone read "Good to Great." It's a business management book that identified what it took to take 13 companies from merely good to actual greatness. For the engineers among us, they had statistical definitions for what constitued great (over 3 times the general stock market return for at least 15 consecutive years). They did the study only for publicly listed companies because the info was easily available. Here's the best part: The 13 companies they studied were ALL the companies that made the transition from good to great. This means there is no sampling error or an off-chance that they were unlucky enough to pick certain companies that threw their findings off. In addition, the guidelines they set out for taking a company from good to great were applied in ALL of these 13 companies. The reason I recommend it is that it is fairly self-evident how to translate the suggestions in the book into our personal lives and get us from good to great. So, everyone read it!
One of the points that the book makes is that every company needs to identify a metric for evaluating success and that the right metric is important. For example, Walgreens identified the metric of "Profit per Customer Visit" as a better measure of success than "Profit per Store" . This allowed them to build multiple stores within a few blocks of each other. "Profit per Store" went down but "Profit per visit" went up. So, my question is, how does one set up a metric for research success? I know it seems a little against the grain to suggest that research should be quantitatively judged, but humor me. One way I have come up with is so...
Research Success (in a year) = T1 x n1 + T2 x n2 + T3 x n3
where T1, T2 and T3 are values for Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 conferences(Say 3, 2 and 1 points) and n1, n2, and n3 are the number of papers in these conferences. There are other variables of course, such as whether your are the first or second author (less important for me right now) and journal publications of course (though a similar ranking or scale can be used for them). Anyone have any different ideas for measuring Research Success?
Everyone read "Good to Great." It's a business management book that identified what it took to take 13 companies from merely good to actual greatness. For the engineers among us, they had statistical definitions for what constitued great (over 3 times the general stock market return for at least 15 consecutive years). They did the study only for publicly listed companies because the info was easily available. Here's the best part: The 13 companies they studied were ALL the companies that made the transition from good to great. This means there is no sampling error or an off-chance that they were unlucky enough to pick certain companies that threw their findings off. In addition, the guidelines they set out for taking a company from good to great were applied in ALL of these 13 companies. The reason I recommend it is that it is fairly self-evident how to translate the suggestions in the book into our personal lives and get us from good to great. So, everyone read it!
One of the points that the book makes is that every company needs to identify a metric for evaluating success and that the right metric is important. For example, Walgreens identified the metric of "Profit per Customer Visit" as a better measure of success than "Profit per Store" . This allowed them to build multiple stores within a few blocks of each other. "Profit per Store" went down but "Profit per visit" went up. So, my question is, how does one set up a metric for research success? I know it seems a little against the grain to suggest that research should be quantitatively judged, but humor me. One way I have come up with is so...
Research Success (in a year) = T1 x n1 + T2 x n2 + T3 x n3
where T1, T2 and T3 are values for Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 conferences(Say 3, 2 and 1 points) and n1, n2, and n3 are the number of papers in these conferences. There are other variables of course, such as whether your are the first or second author (less important for me right now) and journal publications of course (though a similar ranking or scale can be used for them). Anyone have any different ideas for measuring Research Success?