Loose Marble

Boon Cartoon, boondawgoggle. Doodles. Spy, happy face,  naked legs, gun, thug, jail, girl things and hearts. The odds?  We hear this term tossed about regarding casino's and the the odds are in their favor.  Sports games will  have odds of one team winning.  It also applies to endeavors of life and just about any activity or event where the outcome could be more than one result.  There are no odds that 2 plus 2 is 5.  Just never going to happen.  But the odds of a random coin flip landing on heads is 50%. Now most people don't understand or at least they are not comfortable with statistics, which is the basis for odds.  What I've witnessed is people generally dramatically skew the odds or interpret them to favor their preferred outcome by employing emotion and desire. What has me thinking about this?  Well for one I saw a news story this morning.  Now I've seen a lot of news stories that employ this tactic of big numbers standing alone.  This particular story focused on

It's a numbers game.  That is what you hear all the time in most sales literature and training.  Basically, it means there is no real way to determine who is going to buy and who isn't so you just need to keep looking, and asking, and eventually you'll find the one that will buy.  Quite frankly I find that idea an insult to intelligence.  Yea I understand the logic it just seems more like something the upper level executives of an organization say to keep the idiot sales force plodding along.  It's the same logic used by Generals in the military.  Throw enough troops at the problem and surely enough will survive to achieve the objective.  Sales is the only aspect of an organization where failure on such a large scale is tolerated.  Think about it.  In the manufacturing side, would they ever accept a 20% success ratio where 80% of the things you made were defective?  Would even the mail room accept that only 20% of the mail they send out gets to its intended target.  Eno