JULY 2019 / NO. 1
TAGS: MANAGEMENT, STRATEGY, SCENARIOS, UNCHALLENGED ASSUMPTIONS, STATISTICS

Paranoid optimism really works

“Don’t rely too quick on reports and analyses, because the truth is hidden between lies” – Marcel Pheijffer, Professor Accountancy Nyenrode University
“There are lies, dammed lies and statistics, and often government statistics are suspicious” – Mark Twain
How often does management presents strategic plans, cost & revenues estimates, budgets, investments and scenarios which seem to be not feasible, because the basic assumptions are wrong? How often do we fool ourselves with “spreadsheet management”?

Naïve?

Journalists are naïve with figures because they lack the resources, time and knowledge to take a ‘deep dive’. However, to check figures & facts is the core activity of journalists. In strategic intelligence we speak of “unchallenged assumptions”. Not that many people have analytical competences and many have no feeling with figures. Statistics is the science, methodology, and technique of collecting, analyzing, interpretating and presenting of data. This implies that it is crucial to check the data that are collected, which questions have been asked and which potential answers have been given.
We have listed following relevant and wonderful quotes about data and statistics:
  • “Figures won’t lie, but liars can figure”, Fletcher Knebel
  • “How to lie with statistics”, title of the book of Darell Huff in 1954
  • “Statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital”, Aaron Levenstein
  • “It’s human nature to see only what we expect to see”. Sherlock Holmes
  • Beyond number crunching and big data: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess”, Ronald Coase
Aim of Strategic Intelligence is giving ‘countervailing power’ to top management, challenging the assumptions & pre-suppositions and “tell them the brutal truth’ to prevent them of looking like fools a few years down the road. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel published in 1996 the famous bestseller “Only the paranoid Survive”. Risto Siilasmaa, CEO of Nokia, speaks in his book in 2019 about ‘paranoid optimism’. This is strategic intelligence!
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