THORNTON A. MAY
It’s the Data, Stupid
Today, making
decisions without
data is inex-
cusable, if not
anachronistic.
THE GREAT RECESSION is hopefully now behind us, but its effects will be with us for eternity. That’s because the recession fundamen- tally changed how people think about the world, in two ways. First, it focused a harsh spotlight on the quality of decision-making
Thornton A. May
is the author of
The New Know: Innovation
Powered by Analytics
and executive director
of the IT Leadership
Academy at Florida State
College at Jacksonville.
You can contact him at
thorntonamay@
aol.com.
in the modern enterprise. Second, and probably
more significantly, it called into question the
legitimacy of the leaders making those decisions.
Martin Wolf, associate editor at the Financial
Times, summed up the whole tragic scenario when
he said that most people “no longer believe that
[executives] know what they are doing.”
The only way we can win back the trust of
those we would lead, those who would buy from
us and those who would invest in us is to become
data-based leaders. Organizations that do not
embrace the realities of big data, employ the ser-
vices of data scientists and banish data-challenged
CEOs will fail, and fail quickly.
An important potential first step on the path
to resuscitating trust in leadership is to ascer-
tain where your CEO stands vis-à-vis data-based
leadership. I was very surprised to discover on the
blog of Ben Horowitz, who with Marc Andreessen
is co-founder and general partner of the venture
capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the following
evaluation of CEO decision-making:
“Every decision that a CEO makes is based on
incomplete information. In fact, at the time of the
decision, the CEO will generally have less than
10% of the information typically present in the
ensuing Harvard Business School case study.”
As a student of management, I will be the first
to agree that it is a rare occurrence for a decision
to be made with full certainty and 100% of the
information required. But I differ violently with
Horowitz when he celebrates the courage of
CEOs who make decisions under circumstances
of 90% ignorance. That is not leadership. That is
sloth. These are CEOs who are too lazy or too self-
reverential to do the hard work required to gather
the data that would inform a prudent decision.
