The Data Malarkey Podcast Sam Knowles

After our fourth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Four of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between July and December 2023.
 
Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.
 
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
 
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.
 
In Season Four, our guests included:
 
Tracey Brown, director of the charity, Sense About Science.
 
Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis.
 
John McFall, military and civvy street logistics expert, and the founder of Supply Chain Wise.
 
Kieran Maguire, leading football finance academic from the University of Liverpool’s Management School, and co-host of The Price of Football podcast.
 
Ian Makgill, founder of Spend Network, a database keeping tabs on the worlds’ Governments’ $13tn spend.
 
And Mike Bell, data visualiser extraordinaire, who uses the iconography of the London Underground to tell the stories of bands, albums, films, and political careers at his eponymous business, Mike Bell Maps.
 
Data Malarkey will have its usual, between-season break for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back with Season Five on 8 May 2024, and there’s another glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of statistics, risk management, consumer goods, academic publishing, financial analysis, and autism research. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with the blockbuster guest, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a man who had perhaps the best pandemic of any data storyteller in the public domain.
 
To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mike Bell, the first data visualiser to feature in almost 30 episodes of the podcast. Mike is the Founder and Owner of a thriving new business called Mike Bell Maps which describes itself as “Tube maps of bands and other stuff”.
 
Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 13 December 2023.
 
Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.
 
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
 
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.
 
Mike’s had a long career in creating and running tours for bands, a blend of logistical and strategic planning to the power of Excel. “I see tours in Excel!” he told me when we first met. He moved from arena and stadium tours for bands to production of live events for corporates, staging major conferences and exhibitions right around the world.
 
A combination of the first COVID lockdown – not a good couple of years for anyone in the live entertainment and production business – and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s some years ago convinced Mike he had to “use it or lose it” when it came to his highly creative, data-driven brain. He started out by trying to represent the career of one of his favourite bands, The Fall, using the iconography, lines, and stations on the London Underground.
 
Once he’d got The Fall right – to the satisfaction of the brand’s vocal and perhaps a little pedantic fanbase online – Mike’s applied his unique and beautiful way of visualising the world of band line-ups and album contributors to many different spheres. These include films and film genres and even – in perhaps my favourite example – disgraced former Prime Minister Johnson’s political career, with a special line for all those lockdown-breaking parties.
 
Mike’s encouragement to keep mentally active from his neurologist has paid dividends. Though diagnosed several years ago, his “using it” strategy means he’s not yet been medicated for Parkinson’s. A tale almost as extraordinary as the beautiful manifestations of how he thinks that he now sells, both online and from a new shop in my hometown of Lewes, East Sussex.
 
Towards the end of our discussion, Mike gives one of the most lyrical and elegiac descriptions of his stock-in-trade, the humble spreadsheet. Once asked to describe them to his grandmother, he said: “They’re like boxes floating in the air that you can connect, tied together with data strings, that allow you to magically make things make sense.” Beautiful!
 
EXTERNAL LINKS
Mike Bell Maps – https://mikebellmaps.com
Mike’s experiential design business – https://www.freelancevisuals.co.uk
10,000 poems – Mike’s project to take him to 85, writing a poem a day – https://mikebellpoems.com
 
 
To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.
 

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Ian Makgill, the Founder of Spend Network. Ian and his company are on a mission to improve the global public sector procurement market. Spend Network’s website boldly claims that it can help users to “Unlock the $13 trillion global procurement market through the world’s leading tender, contract, spend and grant data”. That’s about 13% of the total global economy.
 
Throughout his career – building databases for 20 years and working with AI for six – Ian has been a passionate believer that data can shape our world for the better. While it often feels as if data is used to point at bad stuff that has happened or show where everyone is failing, Ian is committed to telling stories of how his organisation is using data to shape the future. 
 
Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 29 November 2023.
 
Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.
 
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
 
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.
 
As the driving force behind Spend Network, Ian’s ambition is to level the playing field of Government procurement – from “haircuts in Mexican prisons to airports in China”. As a consequence, every moment of his every working day is steeped in data. Unruly, different, misaligned, fundamentally different data that very definitely is not “apples with apples”. At least when the Spend Network team get their hands on it, bringing together more than 700 diverse sources each day.
 
“All data is bad; all data is dirty!” observes Ian, “though most of it can be made to be useful”. His sentiment echoing the maxim from the British statistician, George Box, that “All models are wrong; some are useful.” Ian also has elements of the forensic scientist about him, with his observation that “the absence of data is a data point in himself”, bringing to mind our 25 October guest, Professor Angela Gallop, and her encouragement to go looking “when the dogs DON’T bark”.
 
Spend Network has so far analysed, cleaned, augmented, validated, and verified 220m lines of spend data from hundreds of Government departments around the world. And he and his data wranglers don’t just apply data science smarts to their heavyweight data. They’ve been using AI since 2017.
 
For Ian, The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch – the paper’s Chief Data Reporter – is a hero of data storytelling and data visualisation, skills that he honed during the pandemic. Burn-Murdoch was the first to conceptualise and visualise excess mortality as the key indicator of Government success (and otherwise) in measures to tackle COVID. Jacob Rees-Mogg is his data devil, thanks to the politician’s imperial measures consultation that provided no option to object (reported here in The Guardian).
 
EXTERNAL LINKS
Ian’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianmakgill/
Spend Network – https://spendnetwork.com
OpenOpps – https://openopps.com
Spend Network on Twitter / X – https://twitter.com/SpendNetwork
 
 
To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.
 

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles welcomes Kieran Maguire, an acclaimed expert in football finance. Kieran’s a chartered accountant, academic, author, and podcaster. For the past decade, he’s been a lecturer in football finance at the University of Liverpool’s Management School. He often appears in print and particularly broadcast media, making sense of the often bewildering and often chaotic world of football finance. He has a reputation for his “clear-headed and rigorous analysis of the financial imperatives and challenges facing football”.
 
Kieran’s the author of the critically-acclaimed, award-winning book The Price of Football, the second edition of which was published in 2021. The Price of Football is also the name of his twice-weekly podcast which – since 2019 – has clocked up more than 400 episodes. Kieran presents the podcast alongside the comedian, Kevin Day. He truly is a multi-media expert in football finance.
 
Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Transfer Deadline Day at the start of the 2023-24 football season, 1 September 2023.
 
Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.
 
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
 
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.
 
A Brighton & Hove Albion fan, chartered account Kieran argues that he doesn’t have the communications and networking skills required to pursue a career in finance. He spends his days obsessively updating spreadsheets of football clubs’ finances, ably assisted by more than 250 alerts from the Companies House website. As well as teaching.
 
The most egregious act of data malarkey Kieran’s observed in the many years he’s been following football finance was the attempted (and still not-dead) breakaway European Super League; “an attempt to steal the heart and soul of football”.
 
For Kieran, the three biggest myths in football finance are:
1. Spending other people’s money – recklessly – is a good thing
2. Footballers’ wages are too high
3. Tickets for the Premiership are too expensive
 
The Premier League’s broadcast deals generate 60% of the 20 top flight clubs’ revenues, and the league is the world’s most popular, with live broadcasts and highlights packages sold in 190 countries. And while women’s football is enjoying its highest profile and a surge in popularity thanks to the Lionesses’ ongoing success, Kieran doesn’t think that there will be wage or playing budget parity at elite men’s and women’s clubs (outside of Lewes FC) any time soon.
 
Manchester City’s men’s team generated £610m in revenue in the 2022-23 season; its women’s team generated £6m. That 100:1 ratio is reflected in the £20m its (injury-prone) midfielder, Kevin de Bruyne, trousers as an annual salary, compared with the highest-paid England women’s player, Leah Williamson, currently on £200,000 a year (or about half of what Harry Kane receives each week from Bayern Munich).
 
EXTERNAL LINKS
The Price of Football – podcast, books, merch – https://priceoffootball.com
Kieran on Twitter (X) - https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire
Kieran’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kieran-maguire-a085033/
A Memorable Gov.uk blog on how Kieran uses Companies House data to keep track of football finance
 
 
To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just a couple of minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.
 

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles welcomes John McFall, a master of logistics and Founder of the business SupplyChainWise. Logistics – a term that originated in the military – is defined as: “the process of coordinating and moving resources – people, materials, inventory, and equipment – from one location to storage at the desired destination”.
 
John, too, originated in the military, and he has deep and broad logistical experience of in both the military and business. He spent more than 15 years in the Royal Air Force, including tours of duty in some of the world’s toughest hotspots and under the most extreme conditions. These included active service in both Kandahar in Afghanistan, and Basra in Iraq.
 
John’s transition to civvy street saw him bring his logistics skills and know-how to the world’s fifth biggest business, Amazon, whose market capitalisation as of October 2023 – when we’re recording this episode – was $1.3 trillion. At Amazon, John looked after operations, supply chain, transportation, and logistics. Until the middle of last year, he was the Head of the Global Speciality Practice looking after those core disciplines for Amazon Web Services.
 
Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 9 October 2023.
 
Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.
 
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
 
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.




John teases out what he believes to be the similarities and differences between logistics in the military and civil domains. At a definitional level – and the end-to-end journey from extraction of raw materials, through manufacture, distribution, use, and recycling – logistics are the same whether you’re making jets or trainers. Tier 1 relationships are best; tier 3 and 4 usually the most tenuous and troublesome. Funding, tendering, and the typically-analytical individuals are also the same, as is the ubiquitous deployment of Excel.
 
Differences feature in purpose (profit vs defence) and also the Just On Time mantra of business logistics. Because of the sheer number of unknowns in the military theatre, Just On Time won’t cut it and the creation and storage of bulk inventory – “just in case” – is a characteristic of the military that business cannot tolerate. The operational certainties of business are often very different from the fluid operations of military logistics.
 
John’s detailed description of the interconnectedness of hardware, personnel, and systems in the military – across air, sea, and land – trigger two analogies for host Sam. The first – of the Wood Wide Web; the mycorrhizal network of fungi connecting all trees, so eloquently described in Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life – is perhaps a little poetic. But the second – of a market with competitors doing unpredictable things, imperfect knowledge, and the importance of taking decisions and not being paralysed by over-analysis – rings truer.
 
John identifies three magic numbers – the ‘Judas number’ of 12-14: the number of people who can be influenced by a charismatic individual; up to 100: the limit of one person’s direct influence by virtue of the number of connections and relationships we can hold in the human brain; and, 1,200-plus: the moment at which systems need to be in place.
 
Jeff Bezos’ legendary six-page memo – tabled at the start of Amazon meetings and read for 30 minutes before discussion – is John’s key for creating an effective, data-driven culture. It trumps charisma, extroversion, flashy slides, and emotional appeals every time and roots decision-making in evidence.
 
EXTERNAL LINKS
John’s business, SupplyChainWise – https://www.supplychainwise.com
John’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmcfall5/
 

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at http

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis, a role he’s held for the past three years. Mark has a rich and varied career in pharma, having served as the Global Head of Commercial Analytics and Insights at GSK before joining Novartis, following a seven-year spell at AstraZeneca in digital, data, and strategic planning. Before working in pharma, Mark spent a decade in creative, content strategy, and brand management in three different agencies.
 
Mark holds both a Batchelor’s in marketing and an MBA in organizational leadership from the Southern New Hampshire University. Indeed, his resumé more than hints at a love of life-long learning, with recent qualifications in AI and behavioural economics from Yale School of Management, the Chicago Booth School of Business, and Kellogg Executive Education. He’s also been a guest lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for the past decade.
 
Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 28 November 2023.
 
Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.
 
Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.
 
Voice over by Samantha Boffin.
 
Mark describes his job at Novartis as “the best job in the world” – particularly for someone as driven as he is by curiosity to find things out and answer challenging questions. He brings together Novartis’ data science practice, some of the smartest market researchers he’s ever worked with, and a crack team of business analysts. As their work is focused on strategic decision-making to change both attitudes and behaviour, this is often overlaid by the learnings of behavioural science.
 
Mark’s rich and resonant definition of insight is a “meaningful, intuitive understanding of a person or thing that compels action or brings about change”. Insight, for Mark, answers the questions “What?”, “Why?”, and “What to do?” Among Mark’s favourite tools for moving from data to insight and insight to action are the Root Cause Analysis (those famous Five Whys) and Design Thinking.
 
More than once, Mark says that insight is a “team sport” requiring a collaborative approach to foster success, one that requires us to bring a beginner’s mind and park our biases and prejudices at the door. In a memorable analogy, Mark compares building a cross-functional team to solve genuine business problems with insight to rugby, that most inclusive and ‘c’ catholic of games that finds a role for everyone, no matter their shape, size, or speed.
 
Mark is in the enthusiast camp when it comes to AI, pointing out the irony that human cognition – rather than technology, data processing speed, or computer power – is now the rate limiter on problem solving. Our role is to ask smarter questions and organise data better for AI to use. With scientific progress set to double every seven years thanks to AI – a seven-fold acceleration in just a couple of decades – Mark gives us a tantalising glimpse of the future of personalised medicine.
 
EXTERNAL LINKS
Novartis – https://www.novartis.com
Mark’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdmontgomery01/
 
 
To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.