Mark Cuban Crashed my Lecture, w/ IU's Dr. Wayne Winston

Every guest on Raw Data By P3 has been top-notch, but we haven't yet had a Doctor on...until now! Dr. Wayne Winston is Professor Emeritus of Decision Sciences at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, he's won numerous teaching awards, is a prolific writer, has consulted the NBA's New York Knicks and the Dallas Mavericks, and he's a 2 time Jeopardy winner! He's a highly entertaining and intelligent guest and we're honored to present this episode of Raw Data By P3 with Dr. Wayne Winston Click Here to check out Dr. Winston's book-Analytics Stories: Using Data to Make Good Things Happen

Episode Timeline:

• 2:00 - Wayne's history and impressive pedigree
• 3:16 - Wayne makes a bold statement about a famous former student
• 4:41 - JRR Tolkien comes up in a random and interesting way
• 8:26 - The Jeff Sagarin connection
• 9:49 - Some great forecasting stories
• 13:33 - Random events and coincidence that lead you to where you are now
• 17:40 - The word is finally mentioned...Excel! And the subsequent Excel discussion
• 25:07 - Tenure process in a University, and how academics are rated
• 34:16 - Wayne's trips to Microsoft, and how he affected the Excel team
• 39:22 - Wayne's amazing new book-Analytics Stories: Using Data to Make Good Things Happen
• 45:24 - Does High School math need a revamping?
• 50:54 - Bitcoin-Is it legitimate?
• 55:10 - The Gender Gap in STEM Fields
• 1:06:04 - Excel VS Python
• 1:18:07 - Analytics In Sports
• 1:28:13 - The Election and Politics, and a prediction!

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Boy, do we have a real treat for you today because we are welcoming the Wayne Winston to the show. Now Wayne has shaped and changed many, many, many lives. He's essentially the Excel Yoda figure at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. His students even include like back in the day, Mark Cuban. The tagline for our podcast here is "Data with the human element", and I don't think anyone could really personify that more than Wayne. An amazing personality, a great guy, and there's no doubt that he's up to his eyeballs in data and data techniques all day, every day. He crunches data on really an amazing range of topics from sports to politics, to social justice. He's always bringing it back to the people involved and how it affects them. And the man's got a freaking Wikipedia page for crying out loud. So no more to delay, let's get after it

Announcer (00:00:56): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

Announcer (00:01:00): This is the Raw Data by P3 podcast with your host, Rob Collie, and your co-host, Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 can do for your business. Go to powerpivotpro.com. Raw Data by P3 is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:01:18): Welcome to the show, Wayne Winston. I am over the moon, seriously, over the moon about having you on the show.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:01:27): Thanks Rob. Well, you guys have done wonders for the world with Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:01:31): Well, I appreciate that and knowing what I was going to be up against today... what we were going to be up against today, I drank even more coffee than usual. I knew I needed more to do battle with the great Wayne.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:01:44): Oh, thanks.

Rob Collie (00:01:45): So Wayne, let's just start off. I met you a long time ago when I was still at Microsoft. It's probably like-

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:01:51): Early 2000s.

Rob Collie (00:01:52): Yeah, probably like 2004, 2005. You wear a number of hats in your professional life. Why don't you just take a moment and give us a quick summary?

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:02:01): Okay. So I went to MIT undergrad. I don't want to say what year. Studied math. Then I went to Yale, studied Operations Research Management Science, never took a business course in my life. And then I got the only job I've really ever had, teaching quant methods in the Indiana Kelley School of Business, which is ranked in the top 10 in the country now and it's a very good school. Had a great department. Wonderful people who sort of mentored me through life because I was pretty immature when I came here, and then I met my wife here. It's been great. And so basically I've gotten consulting jobs. Like I got asked to teach Microsoft Enhanced, which Rob is talking about through [Jennifer Skoog 00:02:39], and came out there probably about... for 10 years, probably once a month to teach Microsoft Enhanced. Went out there in 2018, but then I got luckily asked to write a book on Excel by Microsoft press Alex Blanton. I don't know if Rob knows him.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:02:55): Then I was asked to write a book for Microsoft Press on Excel, which has sold very well and I look on Amazon now and Rob's book is number four on Amazon in Excel books and I'm number six, but some days I beat him. Okay. And I have the Kindle version and I have my old Excel book, but that's really helped me a lot. I've gone to a lot of companies besides Microsoft to teach Excel, and then I was fortunate enough to have Mark Cuban in my class in 1981, who everybody knows from Shark Tank, and I'll predict will run for president in 2024.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:03:26): He's real interested in rank choice voting as an alternative to the two-party system and I think he had actually a podcast of his own on it yesterday. He almost ran this year. I think he just didn't have the time to get on the ballot. And so basically Mark was in my class. He bought the Mavericks. My family went down to see a Pacer Mavericks game, because my son is a big Indiana Pacers fan. He recognized me in the arena and he said, "Wayne, do you have any way to make the Mavericks better?". So my best friend from MIT, Jeff Sagarin, who's the USA Today computer rater, we collaborated on rating teams in lineups. And so we got into the sports analytics area and then I wrote a book, "Mathletics" on math and sports, and I won two games on Jeopardy!.

Rob Collie (00:04:09): We didn't know that. Luke looked that up. He was researching you yesterday.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:04:13): I wanted to get on Jeopardy! from the time I was in seventh grade, and so if I had lost, I may not have come home. And the guy who was on last week said he used data mining to study for Jeopardy!. Now he won one game and then he got slaughtered, but I mean he said he developed word clouds like on King Solomon. If certain words appear in a Jeopardy! clue, he would know the answer is King Solomon. And so I thought that was very interesting, using text mining.

Rob Collie (00:04:41): So often things get judged prematurely by their first outing.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:04:46): That's true.

Rob Collie (00:04:46): A good idea doesn't always necessarily succeed its first time out. I'm always reminded... And this is really nerdy, but that's what we do. In The Silmarillion, the prequels to the Lord of the Rings, written by Tolkien, the first dragon gets introduced after it was born and it goes out into combat, but its skin isn't thick enough yet and it takes a bunch of arrows and it retreats into the mountain and it's forgotten for a long time. Like for centuries, but centuries later it comes back, and now it's ready, and now it's a world beater. There's so many things like that, I think, in life.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:05:20): That's a great analogy and I bet Tolkien planned that out.

Rob Collie (00:05:25): Tolkien was something else. I mean, you understand the-

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:05:28): Yeah, I haven't read those books. I need to.

Rob Collie (00:05:29): Tolkien... We're already way off into the weeds, but I love it. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings as a criticism of the industrial revolution.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:05:39): Oh, I didn't know that.

Rob Collie (00:05:41): There's a whole subtext to the Lord of the Rings that I wasn't aware of as a kid where... Like he basically lived in the Shire growing up, pre-industrial revolution. He lived in an idyllic farming and wooded community, and then the industrial revolution came through and cut down all of the trees and burned them for fuel for the factories and things like that. And so this is what Sauron represents. The ring represents technology and the corrupting power of technology. When you watch the movies or read the books with that in mind, it just makes it... To me, it's just so much more emotional.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:06:18): Oh, that's interesting. You should get a PhD in literature.

Rob Collie (00:06:20): Yeah, well. There are people who get Elvish tattoos. Elvish is a real language.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:06:26): Right.

Rob Collie (00:06:26): Like they're fully developed bilinguist. Tolkien was sort of next to none in world building, but-

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:06:33): Well, I'll have to watch the movies at least. I haven't even done that.

Thomas LaRock (00:06:35): Yeah. So Wayne, first of all, I'm a huge fan.

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:06:39): Oh, thanks.

Thomas LaRock (00:06:39): And one of the highlights in my life is at the first business analytics conference in San Jose years ago, I got to meet you because I was fawning over you to Rob. I'm like, "Rob, Wayne Winston's here", and Rob looks at me and goes, "Oh, you want to meet him?". I'm like, "You know Wade?".

Dr. Wayne Winston (00:06:56): Well, I appreciate like that.

Thomas LaRock (00:06:58): Yeah. So we had a quick little chat, the three of us, and I'm a huge fan, but I just wanted to call out something. You said teaching at IU is the only job you've had, but I knew you because of the work you were doing for the