Learning from Graphs in the Business World

The craft of data visualization is quietly being taught to the world at large, not in classrooms and courses, but by a more powerful force: ordinary exposure to newspapers, magazines, annual reports and the like. These forms of communication have helped to make a few graphing techniques ubiquitous and familiar, and have bestowed on them the sheen of being professional, accepted and approved. Although my focus will be on graphs in the business world, most of the observations apply to the popular press as well. The reach of business graphics produced by corporations and the business press has increased in recent years, in part because of growth in the use of the Web. Another important factor is the general public’s expanded share ownership, through mutual funds and otherwise, which gives rise to financial reports that arrive by mail in homes all over North America and beyond. 1 The ever-increasing ease with which graphs can be created, along with the notion that readers expect attractive visuals, suggests that business communicators are producing more graphs. A bigger potential audience coupled with the likelihood that more graphs are being produced means that a larger population sees business graphs. Almost effortlessly, people learn fashions of all kinds (speech, dress, etc.) from everyday exposure, so the type and style of business visualizations are bound to influence what the world thinks graphs should be like. Unfortunately, however, too much of what people absorb about visualization from the varied sources of business information is third-rate. Extensive academic studies show that many graphs in the annual reports of major corporations are seriously flawed. In 1992, Beattie and Jones published their study of annual reports from 240 of the 500 largest UK companies.