About Gerber Analytics
This site is about improving performance using recognition, especially positive recognition. I am focusing my energies on two areas: education and high school tennis. My goal is to to see if I can get kids (and parents and communities) to increase their efforts and/or participation in these areas by providing information that recognizes high performance and improvement.
Receiving the Greater Columbus Tennis Association (GCTA) Media Award - September 2011
It is also not just about providing information, but performance information that is relative to all parties. People may not care how a high school two hundred miles away performed, but it is motivating to know the performance of a high school rival across town.
In today's society of political correctness, we make it very easy to compare sports teams but not educational endeavors. Think about this for a second -- when is the last time you have heard anyone say that America's high school basketball and football skills are on the decline? You don't. Those achievements are constantly trumpeted and this motivates athletes to do even better. I am trying to trumpet the academic achievements.
Obviously, we are not all good at everything we do and that's ok, but I think everyone can be proficient at everything if they are willing to devote the time and effort. The key is that kids, parents, and communities need to understand that high standards are possible if there are adequate energies expended.
Note that some of my editorial opinions are rather blunt. You know my opinion so please feel free to share yours with me. However, back your opinion with real numbers -- not politicized quasi-facts.
Why do I do this? I am a phenomenally curious person and I love reading books that deal with the social sciences (i.e. Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational). Education and tennis are my social experiments, and since I track online activity you are part of it (thanks for playing along). Since I was fortunate to retire rather early (after working at CompuServe/AOL and Bank One in a variety of areas), this is how I can keep learning and hopefully contributing.
The new Ace report (shown to the right) is an example of a way in which I am trying to get high school tennis players to focus more on their serves. Anecdotal comments from coaches have been positive thus far with several telling me that this report got their girls to practice more on their serves and to be more aggressive with their serves during matches. This was a substantial undertaking because this statistic was only gathered using this web site. I expect it to be very popular during the boys season.
How lucrative has this web site project been for me? If you know anything about web publishing, then you know that I would make far more money delivering newspapers than creating news. While at some point, I would like to make money from the tennis side of the web site, the educational portion is more about benefiting others. However, it makes me feel pretty good to know that I am saving you (the taxpayer) hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing the education experiment myself rather than having a government entity spend the money to create it.
What is my educational background? I have never been in the education business but our family is a huge consumer of education. I graduated from the Ohio State University with a finance/accounting degree and with an MBA. I am an alumni of Miami Trace High School, which is a rural school located near Washington C.H.
Am I really good at tennis? No. I actually prefer playing platform tennis, which is an outdoor winter sport. Cold temperatures and gray Ohio skies make me very happy.
I am a Columbus resident, and when I am not crunching numbers and working on this web site, I am tracking our investments, working on maintenance projects on the family farms (outside of Findlay and Washington C.H.), playing platform tennis, or dodging household tasks.
Contact me via a Feedback if you have any questions.
D. Scott Gerber
Gerber Analytics, LLC
