Messi (Soccer), Lebron James (Basketball), Jerry Rice (Football), Michael Schumacher (Formula One) and Barry Bonds (Baseball) are all famous for being among the best of the best in their field. You probably know them all. The reason why they are so famous is that they are the ones that, because of their role, people directly related them with the team’s success. Just to give you an example, in soccer most famous players are strikers or left/right-wingers. There are no right or left-backs in the list of most famous players in the history of soccer. However, you not only win a
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What are Flow Scorecards and why are way better than regular ones
Scorecards are a semi-standard structured type of report, supported by proven design methods and automation tools, that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and to monitor the consequences arising from these actions (by Wikipedia), and looks like this: The problem I find in that type of scorecard is that there is no relation between the company strategy and the performed tactic activities, which are (if the scorecard is properly design) each one of the measured metrics. On the other hand, it’s not impossible to see either the cause and consequence relationship between the actions or how
Continue readingVision is the key factor for a Data Driven Culture
In my book Meta Analytics I presented two sides of the analytics synapsis. The object that we analyze (companies) and the subject that make the analysis (the people). Between those two things there are a lot of things to deal with to convert the result of the synapsis in an insight that can be taken into action. In this post I’d like to talk about the object, the company. A company is a system, a set of parts that interact together with the common objective of adding value (in the present and in the future). So basically the information system
Continue readingHacking KPIs to growth hack your company
The idea of Meta Analytics (Beyond Analytics) is bringing up to the table a new way of understanding business, so we can measure them in a properly way facilitating a decision making process that brings companies closer to their business results. The current method for measuring performance is through KPIs or Key performance indicators. KPIs were helping us measuring our companies’ performance almost for ever and the feeling was always (at least in my case) that they accomplish that goal when measuring the performance of areas or departments but not when measuring the company’s performance as a whole. The Meta
Continue readingDigital Revolution winners and losers
The digital revolution has begun to show us its results, and the winner is… It’s incredible how everything had changed since I started writing this blog more than a decade ago and is not because the human is bringing some new behavior to the table, as a matter of fact there’s nothing new (really new) under the sun. It’s just basically that everything that we use to do in analogical way is getting digital, and it’s not just “a different way”. It’s actually way more than that, probably like a revolution and like in any other revolution there are winners
Continue readingThe first native data driven company to the Fortune List in 10 years
This is the list of top 10 Fortune companies: Walmart: Founded in 1962. Berkshire Hathaway: Founded in 1839. Apple: Founded in 1976. Exxon mobile: Founded in 1870. McKesson: Founded in 1833. United Health Group: Founded in 1977. CVS Health: Founded in 1963. General Motors: Founded in 1908. AT&T: Founded in 1983. Ford Motors: Founded in 1903. Information was historically expensive until the following products were lunched. Google Analytics: Was launched in 2005. It was after 2009 that it added features to convert the platform into a Corporative Solution. Amazon Web Services: Launched in 20016. Apache Hadoop: Launched in 2011. Google
Continue readingSix habits of most successful analytics professionals
Whether you are an experience analytics professional, or you are just making your first steps in Analytics these are six habits that will definitely improve your performance. Planning vs implementation time distribution: The digital industry is definitely pragmatic and due its dynamism there’s normally no time for anything. However a common mistake is going from the idea to the implementation with no, or not enough planning. If I would have to put a number, I would say that it has to be 80% planning and 20% implementation. But why almost nobody invest 80% in planning and research? Because during planning
Continue readingAre you still struggling with data? Here is why
It’s been seven years since Meta Analytics was published. In that book instead of focusing on the technical aspects I wrote mainly about two main pillars on the insights process. 1) The object: The object is what the subject (the person) will analyze. Understanding the “substance” of what we are analyzing is key to generate a proper interpretation of what is been observe. The object in our case are companies. Companies are systems, a set of things that interact together with a common objective which is making money today (ie Ebitda) and in the future (ie Purchasing intention). The parts
Continue readingHolistic (reductionist) vs Systemic approach of organizations and its impact in goals and metrics
We were talking a lot about the importance of considering companies as what they are, systems. Years of an holistic (Reductionist) approach of organizations generated a huge negative impact. The holistic approach, the scientific attempt to provide explanation of complex things in terms of ever smaller entities, says that if you have a company (system) and you separate it into its parts, then you improve each of its parts and put them back together you will have a better company (or system). The result of this thought was: 1. Independence between departments: If we think that we can have a
Continue readingThe illogical behavior is finally very logical
Norbert Wiener, who is credited with being the discoverer of cybernetics, called teleological systems to those that have their behaviour regulated by a negative feedback. Negative feedback occurs when some function of the output of a system, process, or mechanism is fed back in a manner that tends to reduce the fluctuations in the output, whether caused by changes in the input or by other disturbances. The first and fundamental revelation in this regard is the provided by Darwin with the theory of natural selection, showing how a blind mechanism can produce order and adaptation. In the case of the
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