Riddle: How are Analytics Like a Mosquito in a Nudist Colony?

There are so many opportunities to apply analytics today- it’s like being a mosquito in a nudist colony.

There is a problem, however, that not everyone thinks or behaves like a mosquito. They do not always inherently sense opportunities – the opportunities to apply analytics.

Perhaps I stretch this mosquito analogy too far when I presume that many opportunities may have insect repellent applied to them. For example, let’s consider the high expectations of service at a five star hotel. Ever wait in a long line at your hotel check out during the morning rush with others checking out? It might not appear cost-justified to the hotel, but it may be a very valuable extra expense to add one or more front desk staff if you irritate an important and delayed social media influencer who will complain on Twitter or TripAdvisor.com. How would you know? It is an opportunity for an analyst’s experiment or survey. The insect repellant analogy implies that an analyst may not “sense” an opportunity.

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How Far Would You Go…

… To Achieve Perfection In Your Information Management Initiatives?

Over a good few years, I have been fortunate to have experienced a variety of Information Management projects aimed at achieving an even more kaleidoscopic set of objectives (or lack of) out here in the Middle East (more specifically the GCC).

These projects have covered a variety of sources of information from Paper to PDF, from Web to Word, from Data to Documents.

The projects have also behaved in manners that depict a multiple-personality disorder, from Chaos to Calmness, from Schizophrenic to Stable, from Spontaneous to Structured, from Illogical to Intelligent.

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The Higher You Are, The Less You Know

Executives may be brilliant strategists. But strategists need foot soldiers to carry out tasks. The higher the executives are, the less they can know about what is happening. Yes, there can be summarized reporting and executive scorecards and dashboards. But monitoring the dials is not the same thing as moving the dials.

What strategies are most useful as performance improvement levers?

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History’s Most Famous Serial Career Changers

The average worker today will change jobs about seven times over the course of their career, but few will go so far as to change their line of work entirely. Historically, people have been even less inclined to take the risk of a complete career revamp, often working one job their entire lives. But some of history’s boldest and most dynamic figures shared a common willingness to abandon one career after another, either in the search for their true calling or a simple inability to focus their interests on one particular area. Such famous people are proof that there’s no shame in being a perpetual career changer.

Who are these top serial career changers you ask? …

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Long-Term Nurture: You’re Doing It Wrong

*A portion of this blog post is republished with permission from SiriusDecisions, Inc. To read the full post, please visit: http://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/long-term-nurture-youre-doing-it-wrong/

In most organizations, “long-term nurture” is either a meaningless phrase, or an out. I will illustrate my point by sharing a conversation I recently overheard at a marketing event:

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How to Commit to a Goal

Here’s a brief story about why we all sometimes get distracted from the most important goals in our lives. Perhaps you recognise it?

You are thinking about changing your job because your boss is a pain and you’re stagnating. As the weeks pass you think about how good it would feel to work for an organisation that really valued you. You think this might be a good goal to commit to but…

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What’s the Biggest Barrier Finance Needs to Overcome?

Only 5% of respondents say their Finance organization is delivering Game Changing Value today? But, 42% say there’s potential to deliver game-changing value. What’s that about? Find out.  www2.apqc.org/l/4922/2012-09-19/bb7f9 A study conducted by APQC and EPM Channel argues that CFOs must now double-down on their investments in finance team training and development. The sense of urgency stems…

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Overcoming the Unwritten Rules of Budgeting

What Rules?

We all have personal ‘rules’ and beliefs that direct the things we do and how we respond to situations. Many of these rules are ‘unwritten’ – that is we follow them religiously even though they are neither compulsory nor explicit company policy. We do them because we do, quite often without thought as to their origins or whether they actually make sense.

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A Counter-Intuitive Remedy to Feeling Short of Time

Have you got enough time for everything you want to do? If this survey is correct then about half of us are ‘time-poor’, as the expression goes, or worse, are experiencing a ‘time famine’.

So, what if I said there was a solution to feeling continuously short of time, and it involved giving your free-time away to others?

No, you might say, quite rightly, that doesn’t make sense. If I give away my free-time to others then I will have less time for myself and so I will feel even more rushed. It doesn’t add up.

This is a perfectly logical response, except that it doesn’t take into account the weird way in which the mind works.

Leave a commentCareers, FYI, Management