Using data and information to drive better performance: some takeaway and trends from my studies in Stanford

The motto of Stanford GSB is to “Change Lives, Change Organisations, Change the World”. With that in mind, I would start small, and share my learnings from my time in Stanford. I hope you will find them useful!

Needless to say my time in Stanford has been amazing and I learnt a lot from my peers, the industry in Silicon Valley and Stanford staff.   

The biggest three learning points through hours and hours of discussions, lectures and reflections are:

1.      We are all struggling with finding people with the right data skills

Turned out we are not alone struggling with finding the right people to collect, analyse and visualise data and make them useful. Everyone seems to be in the same boat, and even for some companies in Silicon Valley. So treasure your data scientists and specialists and make sure they have the right tools and management support to do their work and innovate.

2.      Organisations would benefit from a more systematic, data-centric approach to understand our performance, and measure our successes and failures.

A lot of organisations I talked to are still at its infancy on systematically collecting and analysing performance data for individuals, teams and the organisation as a whole. Rather than a systematic approach, we tend to use our judgement, which is okay but very subjective in nature (let’s not getting into all our natural biases, if you are interested, check out the now classic from ..Daniel Kahneman on Thinking, Fast and Slow).  Understanding objectively how we perform will really help organisations to learn and evolve.

3.      Data is (still) an assistant to decision making and we should use data to help us with better informed, more objective decision making.

We are still the master. Algorithms and machine learning can automate and process large volume of data, and come up with optimal short-term solutions guided mostly by short term measures of success. On the other hand, we humans are good at noticing unintended consequences and quickly respond to it, consider things objectively and subjectively, and trade off all of the considerations, but we are often very subjective. Algorithms and data can aid our decisions and make sure we make decisions more objectively.

This is it for now. More to come!