Finding a giant or two for Haystack has therefore been in my thoughts for while, and being thrown out of Bob’s office in Trump Tower hadn’t dented my determination to do this. The preloads would be great of course but the brand association would be awesome. Imagine if Haystack got signed up as a pre-load App on Telstra or Vodafone for example.

Standing on the shoulders of giants was Bob’s way of describing corporate social climbing where you manage to attach your business brand to a larger more established brand.

Many of the approaches entertained today have thus to be viewed as an extension of attempts started at that time.Credit where credit is due – I stole the ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ concept from one of my former consulting colleagues and she got it a few years ago from Bob, the same VC guy from New York that threw me out of his office. Yet, there is ample evidence that even by the mid-19 th century economists aspired to use the objectifying power of statistical analysis as an instrument to improve policy-making and to achieve societal progress.

In contrast to similar efforts displayed in previous decades, the current projects emphasize sustainability issues and focus on the accessibility of the information, using modern tools of measurement and presentation. Today, the desire to provide such a valuable basis for individual decisions and policy-making finds one of its most important expressions in the international debate on “GDP and beyond”. Given the complexity of modern life, it is by now well understood that this strategy requires objective, comprehensive and accessible statistical reporting. An eternal motive of human existence is the search for guidance.While values and beliefs retain their high relevance, today’s enlightened societies also tend to rest their aspirations and decisions on the actual facts and on a sober assessment of possible courses of events emerging from different choices.

Shoulders of Giants free downloads