The Joy in Business

8The Ogive Curve

• Q. Have you ever had a rollercoaster of a day? Today perhaps?
• A. Ogive (pronounced o-jive) management

Managing the Ups and Downs of Your Day

Ogive is a curve in statistics. It’s called a cumulative frequency curve. Monitoring your ogive can minimize, and even eliminate, your WAFs. There is positive ogive and negative ogive.

• Positive ogive is when one point ascends to another and another to infinity.
• Negative ogive is when one point descends to another and another to infinity.

I learned about ogive from my father. He said that life and work are like an ogive curve, so many ups and downs. If you plot on a graph all the positive and negative things that happen in your day, week, month, and year, you take them out of your mind, heart, and soul and put them on the graph (see Figure 8.1). Doing this makes it easier to monitor your feelings, so you don’t get too up or too down. You discover practical solutions. Situations and circumstances become more logical and less personal.

Figure 8.1 An Ogive curve of a rollercoaster day.

Dad always used to say, “There are no problems in life, just situations with an abundance of possible solutions.” If you are experiencing a series of negative ogive events, you can feel your mood/spirit sinking down, down, down, and getting stuck in the quicksand of despair. If you experience too much negative upon negative, upon negative, ...