There is a saying that goes something like: “Don’t make good the enemy of perfect”. What this means is that if something is not exactly right, it should not necessarily be discounted because it may be way better than the status quo.
A long time ago, I was presenting an ROI for a project I was working on. While presenting, we showed an honest to goodness, conservative improvement to the operation of 7 million dollars. The client told me that since the system (not CenterBridge) took 12 minutes to calculate the optimal answer (which only was a small part of the analyst’s time in the system), they were considering turning the system off.
Dan Mahon says I have business Tourette’s. My response to this person was “How much is your time worth?”
Would it be perfect that the optimizer returned a response in 5 seconds? Yes. Is it pretty darned good that it saves the company 7 million dollars a year even though the algorithms solved in 12 minutes? Of course it is. Don’t make good the enemy of perfect.
