If I had a dollar for every time a senior manager complained about departments fighting, I would be a Millionaire. It’s rare for departments not to fight. Is all conflict bad?
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If your financial year finishes in December, ensure you spend your budget. In most organisations, if you don’t spend it, then you lose it. You lose it, but you still must deliver 2019 results. And 2019 starts in less than 40 days.
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A small group of organisations are serious about increasing their performance using innovation. A larger group pay lip service to increasing their performance using innovation. Those that pay lip service are unaware of how their policies and practices can discourage innovation. What can discourage innovation? We explore some wisdom from the book, Seeing what others don't: The remarkable ways we gain insights by Gary Klein. Who?
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With the SAMA annual conference in Florida fast approaching this is a good time to share an insight from our book Managing B2B customers you can’t afford to lose about managing rewards and insights within strategic account management (SAM).
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It is not just the volume but the complexity of data being collected that makes it difficult for us to analyse and interpret in a clear and simple way. As we are bombarded with data, most people still reach for excel to create charts to explain this data. After all, it's easy. Select our table of data, find the command for insert chart, chose one of the types of chart and then choose one of the options for that specific chart. That's easily done.
But as Samuel Johnson may have written over 200 years ago: charts created without effort are read without insight.
So, with a little time and effort how can we create charts to be read with insight and pleasure?
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With a tsunami of data it is easy to create large tables of data. However, with such large amounts of data, it is difficult to see what the message is. When presenting these tables, some people leave them in the default order. So, if it was a list of sales by country or sales by product then these would be listed alphabetically. Unfortunately, insights rarely occur alphabetically. So, if you sort alphabetically then you are burying your insights and making it hard for your audience to find the insights.
Find out how to make your insights clearer.
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Today, thanks to my friend Ian Byrne of Pegras, I read that everyday its estimated humans are producing data equivalent to 10 million blu-ray discs. The world in general and business in particular is overflowing with data. Back in 1978, Samuel Coleridge Taylor wrote: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Perhaps if he wrote this line today he might say: data, data everywhere and not a bit to persuade.
As the tsunami of data washes over us, we drown. While the tsunami of data is new, techniques for understanding data are old.
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