Tag Archives: business thinking

November 17, 2015 · 11:40 am

Choosing Ignorance

Ever had some fact creep up on you and scare you to death? I have had that experience this morning. It’s particularly disheartening because we’re coming up on an election year here in the US and one would hope that people are paying a bit more attention to the news than usual as they seek out facts and the information they need to make decisions. No, I’m not going down the political road. The point I’m going to make is about business, but I find it disturbing outside of business as well. Let’s see what you think.

Business Information Systems

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An organization called the Media Insight Project, which is an initiative of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, conducted some research on how Millenials get news. The headline coming out of the research is that the vast majority of Millennials, people who are ages 18 to 34, regularly use paid content for entertainment or news.  53 percent report regularly using paid news content — in print, digital, or combined formats — in the last year.  That goes against the conventional wisdom that younger people won’t pay for content.  While that is a significant finding, in my mind it buries the lede, which is this:

Among those Millennials who say keeping up with the news is very important to them, only half personally pay for news content. And, even among Millennials who do pay for news, free services like Facebook and search engines are their most common sources for obtaining news on many topics.

In fact, as the study looked at different types of information, Facebook was cited most often as the source for national and political news, social issues, as well as crime and public safety even among those people who pay for news content.  Given that what you see on Facebook is based on an algorithm that reinforces your current attitudes and likes, and is NOT meant to provide you with an unbiased world view, this is pretty dangerous in my mind.  It’s a business problem as well.

Just because some Millenials make an effort to have the broader, less tilted sources of news and information available to them by paying, there is no requirement that they listen to those sources.  It’s not really enough to find the information if you’re going to choose to ignore it.  That’s as true in business as it is outside of the business world.  A younger adult’s willingness to pay for news is correlated with his or her broader beliefs about the value of news, the study found.  Your willingness to seek out business information – even paying for it – should also imply that you’re willing to pay attention and not just pay lip-service.  Are you choosing to do so, or are you choosing ignorance?

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November 11, 2015 · 11:29 am

A Salute On Veteran’s Day

It’s Veteran’s Day once again, and once again I’m posting what I felt at the time was a screed reflective of the day. I decided I couldn’t improve my thinking so I’m letting the post loose on you all once more.  I hope you share my thinking, both about the post and the day.  Back to the usual raving tomorrow.

Often when a national holiday approaches I’ll go back over my posts to see what I’ve written about the day in the past.  I’ve written about Veteran’s Day, which we celebrate today, here, here, and here.

Joseph Ambrose, an 86-year-old World War I vet...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Feel free to go back and read them but I noticed a common theme that I want to repeat and  pretty big omission that I want to correct.

In each of those posts I thank our men and women who served to protect and defend this country.  I do again.  “My war” would have been Vietnam just as my Dad’s was WWII.  He served when his time came because he was needed; I didn’t since the war was winding down and the draft was ending.  Putting the politics aside is almost impossible when discussing the differences between those two conflicts but the service given by those who went is indistinguishable.

I also draw an inelegant analogy between those folks selfless service to us and how businesses ought to be dedicated to serving their customers.  I also touch upon the teamwork needed to succeed.  A long time ago Fast Company published an article which cited an interesting study:

After World War II, the US military commissioned S.L.A. Marshall, a Harvard historian, to do a remarkable study. The question he was asked to research was, literally, why are men willing to die in war? Marshall was allowed to advance and test a variety of explanations. Patriotism – people would die for their country. Or family – men would fight and die to protect their wives and children. The answer that finally emerged was small-group integrity. In a group of people where each is truly committed to the others, no one will be the first to run. So they all stand and fight together.

You know I’m a big proponent of teamwork and believe it’s critical to business success.  The article goes on to talk about managerial courage and how it’s tested and that brings up the omission I want to correct.  Too many of us talk about business as war from time to time, just as we do comparing sports to combat.  We need to stop that.  I used to say that the best part of what I did was that when I screwed up nobody died.  Protecting one’s country for a lousy salary and risking a life can in no way be compared to playing a game for a lot of money or running a business for an obscene amount.

So to my Dad, my other family members, schoolmates, and the millions who stepped forward when their time came to serve I say thank you.  We voted last week – you made that possible.  Think about that as you conduct your business the rest of this week and you serve customers. clients, and commercial causes, hopefully as well as the Vets served us.

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November 4, 2015 · 11:31 am

Who’s Working For Whom?

Ever encounter a situation where things seem backwards? Maybe you’ve seen a parent being told what to do by a child or a customer being berated by a service rep. It makes you wonder who is in charge or who is working for whom. I have another thought along those lines today, and it has to do with data. There was a post from AdAge by their data reporter, Katie Kaye who wrote the following about the NY Times piece on Amazon: 

The article should inspire us to question the value of decisions based entirely on data to create business efficiencies at the expense of human empathy and the arguable imperfections that can benefit any organization or project.

I like that. It makes you ask who is in charge here: the humans or the numbers. We all ingest more data than we can consume, and, unfortunately, some of us allow that massive intake to be regurgitated as unconsidered decisions. That’s a bad idea. The data is there to serve us, not the other way around.

I’m the first to say that we need lots of data. Without impartial feedback, we’re flying blind, and data can help us make better decisions. The key there is “help US”.   Data without the context of a plan is useless. Data that’s not actionable is useless.  Data that causes us to overreact, however, is  dangerous.  If you watched any election coverage last night, you probably heard a lot about early results and the need to wait for data from key precincts.  How many times has someone in your organization overreacted to an early piece of data, only to find out that it was not at all typical of the overall results?  We need a plan, we need context, and we need a little patience.

When we chase after outliers, we’re working for the data.  That’s backward.  Data, and all the other technological tools in our arsenals, needs to work for us.  Make sense?

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