Blogs are like Sharks

I know, the title seems irrelevant and in a way it is. However its message of permanence is powerful; if nothing else because it can be interpreted a thousand ways, most of them being fallacies.
If you are reading this, you, as myself, could not resist the urge of getting more acquainted with the topic, so let me spend a few lines to explain how I came to be with this irrelevant topic. Last week I had the opportunity to be in a class where we were exploring better ways of communicating with clients. We were looking for that Holy Grail that would allow us to differentiate from the pack and be most effective with our communication strategy. One of the exercises consisted in looking at a slide and brainstorming on how to make the message more effective. One of the slides had the title “Blogs are like Sharks”, the supporting arguments were arguable weak, but the concept was powerful enough for not one in audience to even question the title. Everybody went in with the assumption the metaphor was correct and came up with different charts to support the concept. Most of the teams, guess what, came up with a chart with both a blog and a shark and try to make concept work by repeating some of the arguments of the original slide. I was one the only one in my team who challenged the concept itself and I did not get any supporters. Everybody was so excited about the task at hand that forgot to validate if the principle under which they were working was accurate at all.
Lesson learned; don’t let this happen to you. A Business Intelligence project is only valuable if it is pursuing a worthy goal. At the end, the proper execution of the project does not matter if the business case that was used to justify the project was flawed. Don’t let the sea of emotions carry you if you do not believe where you are going. It does not matter how fast you get there if you get to the wrong place.
So, my readers, how is a blog like a shark? That is a good question to ponder at night when the moon is high and your project deliverable is due the next day. If you find a good answer let me know, there is always a shark appearing in a blog somewhere in the world...