It was Benjamin Disraeli who famously decried the three kinds of untruths – “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. And, as we know, middle managers (the good ones, anyway), have long been notorious for coming up with all kinds of statistics to tell exactly the story they want to tell. (Let me hasten to admit my own transgressions in this area). And, in recent years, as advances in desktop computing and open databases have made managers even more expert in this devious craft, it seems like a good time to level the playing field a bitfor the more senior executive whose college computing experience probably involved time-sharing on a mainframe the size of a Hyundai. Yes, I’m talking to you – the venerable executive who’s forgotten more about marketing than these young managers will ever know; whose quick gut decisions are consistently more spot-on than any business intelligence software or OLAP cubes can model.