Happy Christmas! This episode is the last one in 2018 and we will distill the best of the last 40 episodes for you in this Christmas edition of the podcast.
It has been an amazing journey and we will talk about the challenges and the learnings as well as the achievements of the podcast itself. Thus, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look into the podcasting work.
Of course, this episode isn’t concluding the podcast and thus, we’ll provide you with some outlook into what will happen in 2019. Many episodes are already recorded and many are further outlined and planned. Also, there likely will be some changes coming to improve the value, this podcast provides for you.
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Transcript
Best of the episodes from 2018 and outlook for 2019
00:00
You are listening to the Effective Statistician Podcast, episode number 40, best of the episodes from 2018 and an outlook for 2019.
00:11
Welcome to the Christmas episode of the Effective Statistician with Alexander Schaft and Pernambé in P-Skill, the weekly podcast for statisticians in the health sector designed to improve your leadership skills, widen your business acumen and enhance your efficiency.
00:32
In the new year we are launching some free webinars about leadership. So if you are interested in that just check out thee And enter your interest in leadership there by just leaving your email address there.
00:51
So in this Christmas episode today we look back into what happened in 2018, will give you kind of the best of 2018, will also give you a behind the scenes look of what is happening from our side, from Benjamin’s and my side and we will have an outlook into what you can expect for 2019.
01:16
This podcast is created in association with PSI, a global member organization dedicated to leading and promoting best practice and industry initiatives. Join PSI today to further develop your statistical capabilities with access to special interest groups, the video on demand library, free registration to all PSI webinars and much, much more.
01:40
Visit the PSI website at PSIweb.org to learn more about PSI activities and become a PSI member today.
01:53
to the year-end episode. We are today here at my house, and I have a guest, a very special guest, actually, it’s Alexander. Hi, Benjamin. So we are really recording live together at one table for a change. And it’s quite good, because we are kind of reflecting of what we did during the last year, and we are, I think it should be the 40th episode now. Yep, it’s number 40th, and it’s…
02:22
actually the 40th and first episode because we had the zero episode as well. Alright, so it’s basically the 41st episode and we were thinking of what we actually achieved this year and what happened to us and how it happened. I mean, how it happened actually, as you can listen to in the zero episode.
02:50
But it’s more about the episodes that we actually had out. And I think since I actually, or Alexander actually took part in…
03:01
all of the episodes, I thought it might be a good idea to more ask him about what he did, because some of the episodes I did not attend, because he did them for himself or with himself. So that’s maybe a good start to have an interview guest today and just looking back at the year. So, welcome Alexander! Yeah, and by the way, if you hear someone else talking in the background, we are really sitting here and Benjamin is…
03:31
kitchen recording this Christmas episode I was nearly tempted to sing a little bit of a song but I thought maybe we just stick with our beer. Yeah it’s actually I think I wouldn’t have anticipated this year at the start. Really.
03:57
in several ways because it’s never you know when we were I remember that
04:01
We were asked in the beginning, so what do we expect as the number of listeners? Like it’s until the end of the year and I think we said 4,000, 5,000? Yeah, I think our initial guess was kind of 2,000 downloads by the end of the year. And now we’ll be very close to tenfold of that. So nearly very close to 20,000. So I think we’ll very likely hit 20,000 in the first half.
04:31
of January, I’m pretty sure. So that’s amazing. It’s amazing for us to see the feedback and the goal of the episodes and the podcast itself is definitely met. If you think about the listeners, you know the data science episode got downloaded more than 1,000 times.
04:56
Well, yeah, so it’s data side. Yeah, and we had recently a day where we had nearly 350 episodes downloads just in one day. So it’s also really nicely increasing over time. And that is thanks to you, all the listeners, that are hopefully sharing these episodes and that share the insights that we have.
05:25
and help to get more statisticians out there benefit from this podcast.
05:31
Because it’s all about that. Yeah, indeed. And this is also, you know, this is kind of, for us also very, very nice to see the message, or indirect message, if you see the download numbers that keeps up running and motivates us to continue. And it’s, anyway, but actually what I find even more motivating are the case studies. So when I hear from people that I heard a special episode
06:01
that just helped them. These kind of things really help me.
06:06
stay on this and yeah, motivate me to move forward further. Yeah and also the recording of the episodes themselves. I mean this is really, you know, fun. It’s really great. I mean, it is fun. Cheers. There are several episodes with different, I mean it’s always a little bit different talking to different people or being just, you know, having one once with Alexander and it’s really, yeah, maybe this is a good question to ask to you.
06:36
to interview. So what was the episode or what was the episode that was most fun to record? So most fun to record I think…
06:51
A lot of fun was the interview with Lucien and Nomi. When they both were interviews and we interviewed them because they both wanted to become chair of PSI.
07:08
Of course that wasn’t, you know, it’s not an evergreen episode, but I think it tells a lot about PSI in itself, it tells a lot about the people and the vision for PSI, and that was quite interesting to speak about how we as a function can move forward, what our goals are, what our goals for the association are, so that was quite a lot of fun. But to be honest, nearly all of the episodes were a lot of fun to record.
07:38
Yeah, no, I agree. It’s just sometimes something keeps, you know, you know, keep it in mind for or just remember it. And I just would have picked the same because I think the atmosphere was also very nice and that’s what you heard in the interview as well. They both were sitting on the sofa and having, you know, as we are doing today, except it’s not a sofa. And that was really great, you know, how we just had the chat with both of them.
08:08
Yeah, but in other ways, I mean, just from the other side. So what was then, let’s say, the most difficult or maybe difficult to prepare? Like, I mean, some of the episodes are more or less straightforward because it’s a topic that we know or it’s not. But what was the most difficult for you to prepare? So preparation from the kind of…
08:38
putting it into a listenable format, I think the most difficult one was the PSI conference one, because it had so many different pieces in it. That was very difficult. And the other one which was also pretty difficult was the one about the… where I look back into kind of…
09:03
working focus time and getting things done. Your self experiment? Yeah, my self experiment in the summer. That was also pretty interesting because the recording took place over several days. Sometimes a couple of times a day. And that was very, very interesting to record and to prepare.
09:28
So it was then rather a challenge than a difficulty. Yeah, well, all of these were kind of challenges. Other things were more difficult to prepare if you’re maybe not that deep in the topic, then it’s a little bit more challenging to prepare these kind of things. But I always try to come from the point of the listeners and therefore to have a little bit of a maybe naive
09:58
approach into that, make sure that you also ask the obvious questions. Yeah, that’s usually what I’m doing. Just asking because I’m not that deep in the topic often, because it’s just a different point of view and then it’s…
10:14
A lot of these questions where I think it’s just, you know, sorry, maybe one step back and it just reminds me of what we are actually talking about. So yeah, I think preparing the different episodes is really dependent on the topic and on the insight that you have in the very beginning, so from the start. Yeah.
10:39
Well, sometimes you also have challenges in terms of recording. We actually recorded one episode where the upload into our system failed. Okay. The technical side of it. You haven’t actually heard this episode. Obviously. But I’ll try to repeat that next year and hopefully you get to the episode next year in a second tape. Okay, talking about challenges. What is, looking back over the year in general,
11:09
What was the biggest challenge during this year in terms of podcasts? I think finding time is surely one challenge and then in terms of recording, juggling all the different pieces. There’s lots of different podcast episodes that are in different stages. Some are just in the idea stage, in the outline stage.
11:37
Maybe there’s something recorded, some others you already have the blog post written, and some others you have kind of, you know, you just need to find here and submit. And schedule for your systems. So handling all these little pieces together. So the administrative tasks. Yeah, so to say the pipeline of the podcast to manage that, that was a little bit of a challenge. The other thing is…
12:06
Especially with interviews, making sure that you have interviews scheduled and these kind of things. Finding time for the interviews is much more difficult. Yeah, I would have…
12:22
When I started that, when we talked about the podcast the first time, I was kind of afraid that the ideas would be the biggest challenge, but actually, Alexander is so full of ideas, there’s nothing. Of course.
12:38
Actually, I also listen to podcasts about podcasts and very often these podcasts are about finding ideas and that’s really not a challenge. There’s so many ideas. There’s so many kind of technical things that are out there. What I also found quite nice is the survey.
12:58
that we did recently that helped a lot to see that we are on target and what are other topics that we need to talk about. Next year we will actually have some of these topics that you answered in the survey. And if you have not answered the survey, you can just go into your emails and see where that is. I think we need to also put the survey on the homepage. That’s another tool, I guess.
13:27
But that’s a different episode when it gets about the ideas for 2019. So what is the episode you remember the most and why? So is there anything where you say, well, there’s something that happened or I think what I…
13:49
really remember very, very vividly is the episode with, or the two episodes with Wald Ofen, where I had a very, very in-depth interview with him about leadership topics. And that was a lot of fun. And just, you know, Wald Ofen is one of these.
14:15
person, statisticians that I met early in my career, that I really saw as someone that is very, very advanced, still very humble, very good statistician, very good leader in terms of stats.
14:45
really awesome and these two episodes um yeah i quite like to remember too yeah
14:55
This is one of the examples where I didn’t join. But yeah, they were great, really, to listen to. We had these 20 leadership learnings, and for each of them we came up with really, really nice stories that helped to explain these leadership aspects, and Z was really the fun about it. So we had all kinds of different stories, from sports to statistics.
15:25
to management, business, military, all kind of different stories about leadership. But all of them you can transfer them very, very easily into our day-to-day work. And that was quite nice to speak about, also the different role models.
15:49
I remember one of the very early episodes that we had, the interview with Zack on visualization. Because I think podcast and visualization is a little bit tricky to put in a context, but it worked very well. What I was so impressed was the passion that Zack had on the work that he was doing and the reasons why he was doing that.
16:17
you know, the bigger picture of it and it was so amazing, so living the whole interview. I was very impressed and that is what I remember when I’m asked about what’s the…
16:33
what is the most memorable moment and it was really the passion from Zack. In terms of passion, I think Claire Britton also was quite exceptional. I agree. You came after Zack, that’s what probably is. If you go back to the episode of how to become a world-class expert with Claire Britton, that was quite exceptional. To see…
17:02
how in her day-to-day job that from the outside looks like a lot of other statistics jobs, what she accomplished out of that position is quite remarkable. The passion that she invested in there, the knowledge that she invested in there, and the leadership skills, that was a really, really nice case study.
17:31
Yeah, I agree. And from the contents of the podcast, what is the biggest takeaway for your personal or maybe also for your work life? So is there anything specific that you learned and picked up and applied or is it rather the other way around that the podcast is kind of reflecting how you work anyway?
18:00
Lots of in the podcast is of course reflecting how I work and what my ideas about statistics are. Leadership. And leadership. And so there’s a lot in that. I think we…
18:22
need to do a little bit more technical episodes in the future to also go a little bit more in that and that’s also what the survey tells us to have some more technical episodes in the future. So there was maybe not so many learnings from that. I think in the estimates episodes I learned quite a lot. And which
18:49
I found really interesting also was the episode with Shafi Chaudhry on building his own company and how he kind of, you know, from a company he’s very, very involved and he grew it to, you know, more than 50 people. I think now it has probably more than 70 or 80.
19:15
And how he talked, you know, in the last stage, how he organized the company in a way that it runs on its own, that was quite interesting to have a look into. Yeah, for me, I think it was the most I took from, even I didn’t apply it yet, it was just a topic that was very interesting, but I had never really touched as about with the interview we had in Frankfurt.
19:42
at Lili after the conference with Carsten Schwenke about HTA and submissions here in Germany. It’s a quite local desire, let’s say. It’s a local question, but it has global implications and lots of companies are challenged by this and have a lot of difficulties actually to get reimbursement in Germany.
20:12
And raising awareness for that within the different companies, I think for that this episode is very, very helpful. And of course it has price implications through the reference price system across the world. And by the way, Germany is one of the biggest markets in terms of patience and volume.
20:39
Yeah, that was one that I thought was really interesting to have. By the way, which I think is quite nice, we have interviews about all kinds of different aspects. We have interviews about leadership, we have interviews about innovations, we have interviews about the business environment, like this one with Carsten Schwenker, and also interviews about how…
21:09
to do just quality work like so one was on good programming practice with with Shafi or my you know focused work episode on getting things done also like the interactions with different parts of the company and you know with programmers I think we had quite early in the year.
21:34
Okay, when we started in 2018, we probably had some plans about the year. So what did we, I mean, obviously achieved a lot, but what did we not achieve? So what is maybe coming next year? So there’s a couple of things that I would like to have for next year.
21:55
One is a couple of more technical episodes we’ll have. So that is something that you can look out for. We will have, again, of course, something around the conference, a little bit more timely than this year.
22:18
So this year, well, we just started pretty late to have everything kind of for the PSI conference. So this year we will have a couple of, oh, 2019, we will have a couple of episodes that are…
22:37
close to the early bird deadline so that you know what to expect from the conference, that you get a little bit of insights into what will happen at the conference. So that will be quite nice. And remember we already had the one about how to convince your supervisor in joining the PSI conference. Yeah. So I think that… The topic didn’t change. Yeah. That topic didn’t change. And if you haven’t submitted an abstract for the…
23:06
oral presentations then you still have a chance to submit something for the poster presentation and that’s one of the reasons to convince your supervisor to attend the conference. What else will we do in 2019?
23:27
Except for 52 episodes. Well, I guess we’ll have again a summer break. Okay, 51.
23:40
We have started later this year to also send some further material out through the emails. So that is one of my goals to more regular send additional content to those that subscribe to our email newsletter that gets more attractive. Another thing is…
24:07
I’m currently exploring with the Kalk sub-team of PSI, so that are those that are handling students and early starters, and work together with them to create a couple of episodes. We’re still discussing how exactly that will look like, but I think there will be some more material, especially for…
24:37
students at the end of their uni time and start of their time early in their career very early in their career So that’s one thing that Currently it looks like these episodes will come in addition to our kind of usual Tuesday episodes. Yeah impressive
25:04
Yeah, but of course we get some additional help there, so that makes it very nice. And what topics do we have on the list for next year? So what are the ones that you would say are the key ones? I mean, we have a lot of topics, but it’s… So in terms of topics, the first big chunk will come in January will be about leadership because…
25:33
One of the things is that we are launching our leadership course next year. So if you have not registered your interest there, you can just go to the effe slash course and register your interest there that you’re interested in joining this course and you’ll get early notifications.
25:56
We’ll make sure that you don’t miss anything, because there will be only a small window where this course will be open for enrollment. And I already have a couple of people that want to go for that. And as this will be the beta version of the course, we’ll only have limited seats.
26:19
in this course and of course as it’s a beta version it will also come with a little bit of a reduced price actually quite significantly reduced price but so that is one big thing that will come what I’m also planning is a series of topics around benefit risk
26:43
I’m not surprised. Not surprised, given that I was a chair of the Benefit Society. I was waiting for this to come earlier, actually. Some other things happened. And then, as I said, we’ll have some topics that are actually coming from the survey and from our listeners that specifically ask for these topics about whether or not to do a PhD. PhD, prom course.
27:14
training for non-statisticians. That’s training for non-statisticians. It’s a topic that comes up a couple of times a year for me. Yeah, that’s actually an interesting question.
27:30
talk about it and yeah, I don’t know. I mean this is something that is really coming to every statistician basically because they are interfering with the groups, with other groups, with non-statisticians and so how much of statistics can you expect or not expect from them. So that’s interesting. What else? We have other topics about…
27:57
We have some really, really interesting interview guests lined up. We have Steve Rueberg, who was a keynote speaker in 2018 at the conference, who will talk about stats in the more commercial part of the pharma world. If you have listened to his presentation at the…
28:25
PSI conference you know that he’s an excellent speaker. Another thing is we will have something on estimates, of course. And then we have Michael O’Kelly, who is also a presenter at the one day event that
28:49
happens in end of January at IQvia. So check out for that one as well. And what I’m really curious about is an interview with Karen Price about platform umbrella and basket trials. That will be really, really interesting. Yeah. I’m really curious for that to come. It was also a hot topic in the
29:19
regulatory town hall of the PSI conference in 2018 and there’s lots of publications in that area going around. And also the FDA is quite interested in that. So that will be quite interesting. What about non-interviews, so topics that we would touch or discuss between us?
29:46
So we have a couple of topics about mindset. We have a topic, one episode about making mistakes. Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. That applies to everyone. Everybody makes mistakes, but I think especially we have statisticians are sometimes… Yeah, we have a very, very interesting approach to mistakes, I would say.
30:16
But we also have something about sponsor and serial relationships. So we’ll have two episodes about that as well. That’s usually a day-to-day business for everybody. Most of us. Nearly everybody. So that will be one other thing.
30:40
Good. So I mean, I hope that makes you curious for next year. Actually, we will have kind of another related episode to that, which my working title is, Make your organization outsourcing proof. Sounds interesting. Outsourcing prover.
31:03
No, okay, so that that’s very very interesting things to do you know for for next year, so I really looking forward to work on these to interview or to discuss these with Alexander and others and we especially looking forward to see you listening to us and Yeah, yeah, so it’s been great. It’s been a great year and
31:33
If you like to not miss anything subscribe to our newsletter or Follow me on LinkedIn. I share lots of things also on LinkedIn then you don’t miss a lot of extra information there as well and Please share the podcast and finally if you listen this really at the end of 2018 then happy Christmas and
32:03
having great stars in 2019. Thanks for the interview, Alexander. Hahaha.
32:11
So don’t forget to sign up for the leadership webinar which I talked about in this episode. It will be awesome and you don’t want to miss out on this. This webinar is of course for free. Just sign up at zeef slash course. This show was created in association. And next week we will do our episode about the start of the new year and what you can do in order to prepare your goals and be really good prepared.
32:41
for the discussion with your supervisor. Until then, have a nice time.
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