As the founder of Gestalt Dynamics, Jim is driven by a commitment to empower individuals, enhance decision-making, and propel businesses forward through sustainable growth.
Most forecasting efforts focus on getting the number right, such as predicting next quarter’s revenue, headcount, or demand with as much precision as possible. But in practice, the real value of forecasting isn’t prediction. It’s focus. A good forecast forces clarity: on what matters, on what’s
In the latest installment of the series (Part IV), we took a broad look at descriptive statistics, focusing on their role in summarizing what happened and why. We introduced the box plot as a powerful tool for visualizing distributions and demonstrated how to interpret its results. Using box plots, we
By this point, we've benchmarked egg prices against inflation (Part I), examined several supply shocks in the history in the price of eggs (Part II), and used all these accumulated insights to form Part III, where we outlined a generalized supply chain for eggs and compiled a basic
Another tangent, though this one more directly related to Part IV. At this point in our journey, I want to take a moment to talk about the tools of the trade—introducing what I have been/will be using going forward: R, RStudio, Posit, and Shiny. To start, it’s
While working on Part IV of my series Inflation, Supply & Demand, and Eggs, I found myself defining numerous analytics-related terms. This leads me to take another detour to introduce what I’m now calling The Depths of Insight. While this concept isn’t groundbreaking—there are plenty of visuals
If you've been keeping up with my Inflation, Supply & Demand, and Eggs series, thank you for the engagement! As a quick recap, In Part I, we started with the sticker price of eggs, benchmarking it against the Grocery Price Index to uncover their relative resilience to inflation.
In Part I, we began our journey by examining the sticker price of eggs—the price we see on grocery store shelves—and then adjusted and benchmarked it against the Grocery Price Index. This allowed us to contextualize egg prices within broader trends in grocery inflation. From this analysis, a
In the previous post, we took the raw data from the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) for both the nominal cost (sticker price) of a dozen eggs since 1990 and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Food at Home over the same period of time which I've taken
Imagine this: Last year, you could walk into your local grocery store and grab a dozen eggs for less than $2. Today, that same carton might set you back $5 or more. If you’ve stood in the dairy aisle recently and wondered what’s going on, you’re not
In the second quarter of 2024, the U.S. economy saw solid growth, with total GDP increasing by 4.2% in current dollar terms, bringing the overall value of goods and services produced to $7.29 trillion. After adjusting for inflation, real GDP showed a more moderate rise of 0.