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Senior leaders love to be challenged, when you prove them right!

Unfair? Yes. There are plenty of great leaders who truly want their staff to speak up. However, even some of these may suffer from measurement blindness.

When it comes to numbers and decision making there are three positions people take.

Believers

These people believe measurement enhances decisions. They will ask for measurement and readily listen to the numbers being presented, they will look to see if there are any abnormalities and

As Western companies are being put under increasing pressure to cut expenses and improve return on assets, the dilemma of whether to keep key functions in-house or outsource them has taken center stage.

Manufacturing units are being identified with Make-or-Buy Decisions as third-party suppliers in Eastern Europe, China, and other low-cost regions hold out a promise of significant advantage that companies in developed countries can’t offer.

The Make-or-Buy Decision extends beyond manufacturing. It

New market entry provides potential opportunities for organizations to grow. But penetrating a market and establishing a new business is fraught with complications and failure. Attempts at entering a new market often fail, in fact, research suggests that for every successful market entry about 4 fail. The reasons for such high failure rates involve timing, scale, competition, capabilities, and predominantly irrational decision making.

The decision to successfully enter a market necessitates deta

According to Michael Henderson, Corporate Anthropologist on Oscar Trimboli’s Deep Listening Podcast, people in the western world like threes because we like balance.

We like Low, Medium and High. We like the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We also like it when a salesperson stops at three when telling us about the wonders of their product. Trust and desire builds to three and starts to wane above three. As in, “Why does she need to keep listing stuff? Is there something not g

Bedtime data stories are telling stories about data with data.

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why bedtime stories?”. Maybe you grew up with them and you have kept up the tradition. Maybe you understand they are good for your child’s development, in particular their vocabulary, comprehension and the development of their creative brains. If so, you would be right as evidenced in this research published in the journal Pediatrics.

However, there is more to it than their personal development. You are a

Those of you that know your maths know that an S-Curve can have an exponential portion to its curve but it can’t BE an exponential curve. However, I recently came across a diagram showing a series of S-curves overlaying an exponential curve which to me portrayed something very different to seeing either in isolation. It was in this post by Tim Urban The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.

There are data miners and then there is data mindset. The former are the people and/or their tools that do the digging through the numbers. The latter is about a whole lot more. 

Last week I blogged about how to help people believe the numbers. This week I am going a big step further talking about four different types of data mindsets and the implications for decision making in an organisation (see figure).   

                                                                                 Data Mi

Decisions are all about emotion, however, numbers are so very important. At the end of the day if the bank balance is zero, no amount of emotion is going to change that. 
When it comes to numbers and decision making there are essentially three positions people take. 

One of the most soul-destroying events that can happen to a company is for a bean counter to be appointed as CEO with a vision that involves cost cutting and not much else. While I am one of the first to hold true to “In God we trust, all others bring data”, I have seen too many companies damaged from a CEO overly focused on cost cutting. A CEO that is dumped within a few years. 

Don’t get me wrong. A focus on costs is important and sometimes dramatic cost cutting is essential, however, as with a

A strategy is of itself a hypothesis. Something that is proved true or false over time.  For more on this, read one of my most popular blogs here: A strategy is but a hypothesis.

In proving your hypothesis, you eventually find out if you are spending on a failed strategy or if you are investing in a successful one.

The key to shifting from spending to investing is to set up your strategy, from the start, so you can measure your spend and your return on your investment each step of the way. This al

We need data we can trust so that we can build trust using data. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. 

In recent blogs I have been urging you to stand in the shoes of those you wish to influence. Recently I read a blog by futurist Gihan Perera that gave another reason to urge you on. In his blog There’s an ‘I’ in Team he reminds us that the young new entrants to our workforce have a very different WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) than new entrants of past decades. Gihan talks about their wishes including the need for identity and personal development. 

So they won’t care what you think unless you can

Research Briefing: Key Decisions to Create an Attractive Ecosystem

By:

Weill, Sebastian, Woerner; Apr 19, 2018

Source: MIT CISR

The next five years will be critical for large companies to create successful Ecosystem Driver business models, at least for their best customers. MIT CISR research shows that the Ecosystem Driver model is the highest performer of the digital era to date, but it is also challenging to pursue.

In this briefing, we describe seven key decisions around design dimensions that wil