MAY 2016 / NO. 2

TAGS: ANALYSIS, GARY HAMEL, CEO, MANAGEMENT, DATA, CRM, JEFF BEZOS

The best decisions are analysis-based

“Big Ego’s at the Top and how to organize Countervailing Power”

Most management models lead unnecessary and enormous cost increases with a large chance of hugely disastrous decisions, because top managers are hardly ever corrected, according to Gary Hamel. We need decisions based on responsibility and not on company position. CEOs and boards of management show ‘Sun-King’ behavior with too much distance from the shop-floor, leading to wrong strategic decisions.

Management of Data versus Management of Intelligence

The undeniable power of data and information brings with it the risk of becoming overly-reliant on or even obsessed by big data. The Big Data Survey 2015 by Emerce NL shows that most data is quantitative from sources such as CRM-systems, customer databases, web statistics, email statistics and transactional data. We call this data-crunching; it deals mainly with the status quo and does not deliver future-based insight or foresight. This is a similar situation to that with information, which is less of a scarce resource as it becomes ubiquitous and search costs decrease. However, the scarce resource which has to managed is no longer data and information, but attention. At senior management level, attention is fragmented, people are quickly distracted, and even when the data and information are impeccable, decisions are delayed unduly or are just plain bad. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos says that decisions that can be made by analysis are the best: decisions based on facts! This is strategic intelligence at its core: providing perspective over and beyond the facts.

“There are decisions that can be made by analysis. These are the best kind of decisions. They are fact-based decisions!”, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

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