ZERO IS NOT NOTHING AND NOTHING IS NOT ZERO

One of the great advances in mathematics has been the concept of including the number zero into our numeric notation. I was brought up to believe that this concept originated in Islamic culture, but my Islamic friends tell me that it originally came from India. Well, wherever it came from, just imagine someone in today's Western Culture trying to do arithmetic in Roman numerals, like: XVII times MCMXIV equals what? But one of the mistakes we make when using the number zero, is to think that it stands for nothing. To see why this is a mistake, just consider taking away six zeros from a salary of $1,000,000 to make it $1. We certainly haven't taken away nothing!

The point is that zero represents something. What that 'something' is can be different things in different contexts. For example:

• An empty column in a positional number system. Thus, in the number 101, we have one element in the hundreds column, none in the tens column and one in the units column; hence one hundred and one. The zero therefore has significance in terms of its position; and is certainly not nothing: as our previous example of the $1,000,000 salary illustrates.
• A reference point on a scale: like 0 degrees Celsius on a temperature scale. Zero degrees is certainly not 'no temperature' or 'no warm or cold'.
• The absence of one thing that, far from being nothing, represents the presence of something in its place.

That last example can be illustrated by the so-called 'curious incident' in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story 'The Adventure of Silver Blaze'. The key to solving a murder was that the guard dog did not bark on the night in question, revealing that the criminal must have been well known to the dog. Zero dog barks was certainly not nothing.

The curious incident of the dog represents a crucial issue that is significant for a critical view of Management as Magic. Managers seek to control many of the aspects of their organizations using formulas (magic spells?) based on numbers that count and measure. Take sales and stock control as an example of this. Both managers and the Law, require exact counting, measurement and recording of:

• What has been sold, allocated to customer orders, or has been delivered.
• What is in stock and available for sale.
• What has been ordered from suppliers or has been shipped.

Also, when a legal audit is made, any inaccuracy in these figures could amount to a crime . But how does this approach of counting and measuring deal with aspects of sales management that are not counted or measured? Like:

• How many customers considered buying a product, but found the same one cheaper elsewhere?
• How many customers didn't realize that we stocked a desired product?
• How much custom was lost because we only stocked some of all the products a customer wanted?

Are the answers to questions like these last three, any less relevant to the managemnt of sales and stock control? Yet there are many important 'sleeping dog' questions like these across the whole range of management; but they are ignored because there is no magic formula to deal with them. So we might say that:

Management needs more information than managers can manage

More symptoms . . .