Don't ask the question if you'll do the same whatever the answer.

schnauze /ˈʃnaʊz/ vb (tr). to spend time seeking out bits of information for which one has no practical use, and in so doing, waste the time of others.

Attached below is a picture of Zelda, our six-year-old Miniature Schnauzer. We love her dearly, but when on lead, she has a frustrating habit of holding up our walks with almost every step, to sniff around at another piece of pavement, wall or tree. Clearly she is seeking scraps of information—probably about who else has been to the same spot recently—but why does she need to know? It can't be an interest in other dogs, because she's generally not keen on other dogs.

Strangely, she tends not to sniff around as much when she is off lead, so perhaps she does it just to annoy me. So in honour of Zelda, I offer up the word schnauze, which I defined as above. It's not original—a quick Google reveals that several other Schnauzer owners are using the term in an eerily similar way. And the verb may well mean something in its original German.

Staff departments in large companies can lapse into a degree of schnauzing if they veer too far away from the company's core activities, which I summarize as developing stuff, making stuff, selling it, and servicing it. It's very easy to ask questions, but if you have no practical use for the answer—or if your actions will be the same, whatever the answer—then you shouldn't have asked the question in the first place.

It's easy to schnauze a market intelligence department. There are so many different ways of looking at the IT market that, despite us feeling we may well have the best grasp of what's going on of any observer of the IT industry, for most questions, we don't have the answer instantly ready to hand—some research is necessary. For example, market intelligence has to measure many things in at least two currencies: not just the actual US dollar that most of the industry has agreed upon as the standard rate of measure for financial activity, but also the plan dollar that is used internally to help each country's operation measure its sales success. So if market intelligence produces a graph in actual dollars, why not then ask them how the graph would look in plan dollars?

Tomorrow I'll give my views as to when is the right situation to use actual dollars and when to use plan dollars. Hopefully someone will reply, and I'll learn something, and we can begin to distinguish the action-oriented questions from the schnauzing.