In May of 1979, long before I became a pollster, I learned a lesson that has proven invaluable throughout my polling career.
My father and I were summoned to a meeting at Getty Oil. They had already invested $5 million in our crazy idea for an all-sports network and had to decide if they would continue to fund it. We sat on the inside of a boomeranged shape table while Getty officials and lawyers asked questions from all sides.
Since I had done all the projections, someone asked me to justify the projections for 1988. It was a bit absurd to ask about projections nine years into the future for a startup in an industry that didn’t exist.
But, as a numbers geek, I proceeded to give an answer that was numerically precise and utterly worthless (probably sounded like a lot of young Congressional staffers).
I said there were 12 million cable households in the U.S., AND IF cable grew at such and such a rate, AND IF a certain percentage of those cable systems signed up for satellite programming, AND IF a different percentage of that percentage carried our network and so on and so on things would be great.
I piled credible (but uncertain) assumption upon assumption and proudly declared the answer. Read the full essay on NapolitanInstitue.org