Which Moves First, the Company’s Resources, or the Customer’s Devotion and Happiness?

Interpreting Information

In my mind, each business operates like an oversize teeter-totter.  One end goes up, the other goes down, or the other way.

In the middle supporting the business is the customer acting as a single pivot point.  However, customers naturally move about each and every day and, when they move, they also move that rather delicate pivot point within each company.

The business, operating as a teeter-totter, has two distinct sides or branches:

ATTRACTION SIDE		Sales > Marketing > Research > Product Development
SUPPORT SIDE		Customer Service < Manufacturing < Procurement < Management

Ideally, businesses want an even amount of resources/weight/success on both sides of their teeter-totter.  However, keeping everything balanced is rather challenging because those customers are constantly moving.

Deciding when to allocate resources, personnel, and budgets on either side of the teeter-totter to anticipate where the customers want to go next calls for the strong abilities to interpret information.

Which brings me to a study I like to reference:

Good Data Won’t Guarantee Good Decisions

I am always looking for better ways to interpret new information.  This is an insightful article identifying how people look at data, then make decisions.

The article states:

“To help organizations measure and improve employees’ facility with data-driven decision making, Corporate Executive Board created the Insight IQ, which assesses the ability to find and analyze relevant information.

We evaluated 5,000 employees at 22 global companies and sorted them into three groups:

• Unquestioning Empiricists trust analysis over judgment.
• Visceral Decision Makers go exclusively with their gut.
• Informed Skeptics—the employees best equipped to make good decisions—effectively balance judgment and analysis, possess strong analytic skills, and listen to others’ opinions but are willing to dissent. They’re the kind of data-savvy workers every company should try to cultivate. However, we found that only 38% of employees, and 50% of senior managers, fall into this group. Our analysis also showed that functions whose employees had the highest average scores performed about 24% better than other functions across a wide range of metrics, including effectiveness, productivity, employee engagement, and market-share growth.”

I see myself as a member of this third group, Informed Skeptics, and I dedicate this blog to finding better ways to interpret information.  Businesses need all the help they can get to maintain their delicate balance as they react to where all those darn customers are going!