The Mysteries of Business

January 4, 2010 · Filed Under Business Ideas & TIps · Comment 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece called Open Secrets for the New Yorker. In this amongst other things he talks about how a lot of the demise of Enron could have been read from the publicly available data and that some analysts did. Malcolm goes onto talk about Gregory Trevertons work of the distinction between puzzles and mysteries. With a puzzle there is information missing and to solve the puzzle the missing piece is needed. Mysteries though the information is all there the answer just needs to be found.

Roger Martin writes in his great book “The Design of Business” about ‘the knowledge funnel’ where things start as a mystery and then move to heuristic and finally to an algorithm.

It is my belief that too many people in business rely on false heuristics to lead and manage. As a result they do not get the full efficiency gains that can be obtained from measuring what matters.

Additionally there is the biases and assumptions that we all have which can lead us down the wrong path. Too often information is being collected from clients that really is only vanity information. It is not useful information to truly understand the customer.

True understanding of a customer is not done by a view dorothy dix questions on a survey but rather by observation of their behaviour.

Firstly it is necessary to start with the strategic objectives. We can not be all things to all people. What is the direction of the business?  Armed with this we need to understand our customers and prospective customers. With this we will know what is success in the eyes of the customer. The information is there the business needs to have a culture of not making assumptions, removing biases and looking at the information.  From all this we can then design a set of metrics that can direct the business. There will be mysteries to solve both inside and outside the business but this process will direct the value creation.

In this blog this year I will be exploring further the mysteries of business.  Mysteries of the customer, of the team, of management, of leadership etc. Let the data tell the story.

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