Proof of the pudding is in the eating.

A $24,924 million revenue company, ConAgra was taken for a spin by a civil engineering professor. It was 1999; ConAgra's brand Healthy Choice was promoting its products through a mail-in offer. The deal was that for every barcode from 25 cent pudding package, the buyer could redeem 500 frequent flyer miles from Healthy Choice (ConAgra). David Phillips, a professor at University of California, calculated that the miles far outweighed the 25 cents and set about collecting all the pudding he could find in the town of Sacramento, and even had more ordered through a store clerk. To avoid suspicion, he told people he was stocking up for Y2K.

Phillips ended up with 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles for $3,140. Enough for 31 round trips from California to Europe.

Brings the phrase "breaking the bank" to mind.

The importance of playing the numbers right cannot be emphasized enough in management. While much of business can seem like a gamble, and many times you have to simply play against odds in order to win, wisdom lies in knowing when to wing it and when to calculate. The best, of course, take as much guesswork out of the guesswork as possible. It can be called modeling, risk management or forecasting. Promotions, cross-selling, revenue and sales forecasting, evaluation of marketing metrics, web metrics, logistics and business planning in general are all realms that have a lot to gain from simple Excel sheets. It just boils down to using the right numbers correctly.

Our Pudding Man is currently using the frequent flyer miles, but earning them back 5 times faster than he spends. He donated all the pudding to charity, earning a $815 tax write-off.

And ConAgra? In 2001 they were hauled up for mis-reporting income from 1998 to 2001, to the tunes of thousands of millions of dollars. They have been also been indicted for employment bias against hispanic females, high salmonella count, spraying water on stored grain to show increased weight, besides having been to the brink of bankruptcy.