The Ethics of Business Presentations

I saw a presentation about business dashboard software by a guy from MicroStrategy yesterday, and started to wonder about the ethics of attribution in the business world. He showed a demo of a "bubble chart" that happened to be about fertility rate and life expectancy in different parts of the world over the last 20 years – in other words, Hans Rosling's example and visualization. There was no attribution, he made it sound like he had come up with that himself.

This was part of a small meeting of about 20 business folks, and it was sponsored by MicroStrategy. The presentation wasn't bad, though I did see a few of the things Stephen Few likes to jump on: gauges, flashy graphics, and he said something like "the most important thing of course is to have dashboard desktop-publishing quality output." To his credit, he cited Gene Zelazny's Say it With Charts, which has a food-pyramid style of recommendations for how many percent of your dashboard should be bars, lines, pies, etc. And if I remember correctly, 50% should be lines and bars, and only 5% pies. Most of his examples were also pretty reasonable, despite the occasional gratuitous animation. But I digress.

Their bubble chart is very similar to gapminder, showing size and position, and of course including playback controls. You can also split a bubble into smaller parts if it is aggregated, and that also looks exactly like in gapminder. But what ticked me off was the example: life expectancy vs. fertility rate by continent over time. Couldn't he have at least picked some other time-dependent data? I doubt that Rosling would mind, but still.

He did mention Stephen Few's and Edward Tufte's books at the end (which I found interesting, especially Few), but no mention of Rosling. The do use a lot of relatively current visualization ideas (including treemaps, which they call heatmaps), and that is certainly a good thing. And they can't give credit for everything in a presentation. But when they take such a big example almost verbatim, shouldn't there be at least a mention of the name? Or don't people do that in business? And is that considered ethically okay?

Posted by Robert Kosara on November 21, 2008.

---

Comments

Tony Rose says…

I think it's a matter of integrity for someone to attribute anything they use to the original creator. In the business world, unless you're talking about theory, then you're probably using your own data or analysis. If it was me, I would have included the source either below the visual or as a footnote.

I wasn't there, but it sounds like they were trying to embellish "their" ideas, but either using or quoting work from someone else. I could be wrong, but isn't that plagiarism? If they didn't know the difference between treemaps and heatmaps, then that says a lot.

To answer your questions:

Yes, they should have mentioned the name/source.

Yes, *some* people in the business world remember back to our education where we were required to cite sources.

No, I would question someone's integrity when I see work copied or repeated verbatim without a mention or citation.

derek says…

...but at a tangent, I wonder if anyone can help me find out about something called a "Marshey" or "Marshy" diagram or graph, or chart. Some colleagues showed me something in Excel they named as such. It was a line chart showing a time series, against a colored background area representing good, acceptable, bad, etc. So far so good. But there was also a line series of markers (no line) with error bars. The line was supposed to pass between the error bars of the markers, which were thus called the "gates". So although the colored areas were judgmental, the error bars, which followed a different path, were the actual target.

I have little confidence that what I have described is a standard example of the type of chart that was named to me, as I have experience of charts and scorecards being named after some passing business fad, heavily modified over the years, but still named after the original scorecard type. I've seen many "Balanced Scorecards" that bear no resemblance to Kaplan and Norton's original concept.

So perhaps this is relevant after all. It's the opposite business practice: incorrectly attributing a display to some prestigious source, when the design does not adhere to that source.

Jeremy says…

You're dealing with a sales guy. I've seen the exact same presentation, my complaint is they didn't make a point of letting you know that the moving bubble graph wasn't an out of the box function, but instead a customized widget.

I don't think that there's an issue with not giving credit to the author of the original research, because the forum that you were in wasn't meant to showcase the integrity of the data, or to take credit for the research and compilation of the data, but instead the presentation was meant to showcase the functionality of the product. The creation of the customized flash report may have been modelled after Rosling's dashboards, it was still recreated within the Microstrategy platform. While it would be nice to give credit where credit is due, I don't see it as an ethical lapse.

Jon Peltier says…

Being a sales guy is no excuse. The guy shouldn't give the false impression that he or his organization is capable of collecting, analyzing, and presenting such a rich sample of data.

Jaap says…

@Jeremy:

The moving bubble graph is an out of the box flash widget in MicroStrategy. Not an exclusive custom widget.

Also, in the MicroStrategy manual/course guide about building dashboads, Stephen Few and Edward Tufte are mentioned. Other works cited: Wayne Eckerson and Gene Zelazny.

I agree to the point here: they should have mentioned Hans Rosling in the presentation. There is no weakness in using great ideas and techniques of others or following the experts ;)