Stupid List Tricks From David Letterman's Top Tens to the Top Forty hit parade to the American Film Institute's Top 100 Movies, the media bombard us with lists.
Smart publicists know that lists are a sure-fire means getting attention.
But sometimes there's less to a list than meets the eye. Two recent examples came under fire for misleading readers. Companies were ranked by criteria that included the number of diversity programs, amount of diversity training offered, number of minorities in executive positions, extent to which corporate philanthropy was targeted at minorities, and the amount of business funneled to minority-owned firms. They sent surveys to the 1000 largest businesses in their database, as well as to the top 200 privately held companies, and tabulated the Top 50 rankings from the responses. This type of self-selected survey is notorious for producing flawed data.