Business Insight Zone

Do you get your information from a sprinkler or a pump?

My neighbor down the street hoses down her yard in the afternoon. In the heat of the Austin summer, she walks around for a few minutes and sprays the grass by hand.

Why she does this, I don’t know. But inevitably she loses a lot of water to evaporation in the hot sun, and it’s hard to believe that her hand-spraying could cover the yard as consistently as even one of those cheap rainbow-style sprinklers. According to everything I’ve ever read about lawn care, she’d be better served to run a sprinkler for a longer while every few days, ideally in the cool of the evening.

A lot of the people I know — and me, too, at times — often do something like the lawn-spraying trick with the way we take in information online. Instead of setting aside a time when we can focus our efforts, we “sip” from the Web’s information sprinkler for a moment here and a moment there throughout the day. The results: no consistent coverage, no depth to the “root structure” of our knowledge, and no real plan for how we can best use information to help our business garden thrive.

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Use the pump, not the sprinkler.

Here’s a self-serving example of an information pump: One of the things that has helped Hoover’s thrive over the years is that we address the sprinkler/pump problem head-on. You may be too busy to dig up everything there is to know on Johnson Controls before you call on them, but our man James Bryant isn’t. James has been a Hoover’s editor for something like a decade, and he knows manufacturing inside and out. So while you’re busy going about your daily tasks, James is busy digging up the latest on Johnson Controls and all the other companies on his beat — just like the other 80+ editors who work here.

It’s the same for some of the best blogs around: people read Gizmodo because they want to keep up with the latest in high-tech gadgetry; they read Jeremiah Owyang’s weekly social media industry wrap-ups to get an expert’s view on what’s happening in that field. Really, this is no different than the news summary at the front of the print edition of The Economist, except that the niches are sliced thinner — and they’re readily available online.

The point is simple: the right sources allow you to drink deeply from the expertise of people who know what the heck they’re talking about. It’s worth it to find out what they know, even when that means drinking from the Web a little more deliberately.

Both of the old saws are true:

• Knowledge is power.
• A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The trick is to get past the point of being dangerously underinformed, to the point where you can really use the knowledge you’ve gained for powerful business ends.

How do you collect the information you need to do business?

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(Sprinkler photo by zone41; pump photo by damien_m_in_japan.)

Category: Hoover's, Internet, The working life