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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

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

You might be shocked to know that when Social Security numbers were first given in the 1930s, the intention was never to use them as a form of identification. However, most of us use our Social Security numbers all of the time, from doing transactions at the bank to visiting our doctor’s office.

You need your SSN to apply for jobs, to open credit cards, and even to marry the love of your life. Since we use this number of often, what happens if you lose your card, it gets stolen or it’s leaked in

Confronting the Tyranny of Management by Numbers: How Business Can Deliver the Results We Care About Most

Enrique R. Suarez

Business Strategy and Management Consultant

suarezenrique@yahoo.com

According to professor Thomas Johnson, it’s easy to talk about the changes wrought by today’s global economy. But most such discussions fail to address the real impact of business practices in the twenty-first century.

The growth of industrial societies during the past 150 years – and particularly the aggressive