Prepared Minds

Some companies will shape the future after COVID-19. They’ll use machine learning to turn massive amounts of raw information into “golden” decision[s]… The practice of data alchemy is grounded in a new appreciation for what analytics can do, how to use it effectively, and—most importantly—how to embed it in day-to-day decision making.

Predicting consumer demand for goods and services during the Covid-19 pandemic is more complicated than ever. To improve prediction, managers must abandon their biases and seek out new data sets for forecast models, tap local-market knowledge, combine the outputs of many different models, and continually test and refine them.

Many companies get little value from their annual strategic-planning process. It should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage ’creative accidents.’

My guess is that there may be a diversity policy on the books, and that there are people of different genders and races. But we need more diversity than that. We need much more intellectual diversity, and we need to find ways to put unlike ideas together in new ways.

One post won’t make you data savvy, but it will help you become data literate, open your eyes to the millions of small data opportunities, and enable you work a bit more effectively with data scientists, analytics, and all things quantitative.