Tag: decision-making

All I Need To Know About Someone Is What Was The Last Book They Read

I’m not sure where I picked that concept up from, it’s probably a variation of a famous quote whose author escapes me. But for me there is a lot of truth to the statement. When you find out the last book someone read you can tell a lot about them. When you get them talking about it you can gain incredible insight into who they are and what motivates them.

In my case I picked up a book at the airport for my flight and to help me get into trainer mode. The book I picked up was Decisive, a business management and leadership book by the Heath brothers. It was on the top of a lot of 2013 lists and I had heard of it before. Once I started reading it, I quickly saw some key points I could roll into my next analytics training class.

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Here are some of the key points:

> Most decision are made in an instant and are often just a choice between two options.
> Although helpful, Pro and Con lists are limited in their effectiveness.
> Most business decisions, when looked at a few years later, were failures.

In the book the Decisive, the authors list four tips to help make better decisions:

1. Widen Your Options by eliminating factors that put artificial limits on our choices.

2. Reality-Test Your Assumptions by taking them out of our head and into the real world.

3. Attain Distance Before Deciding, which means don’t rush and gain other perspective.

4. Prepare to be wrong, the willingness to take risks is a challenge for all of us.

Its a great read, pick it up.

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

Workshop On Decision-Making For Better Work-Life Balance

I was recently asked to put together a workshop on work-life balance for BPO employees.

Here is the meat of it:

Via a real-world focus, this workshop will provide a wide range of information designed to empower BPO and Call Center staff towards a healthier work-life balance.

> Work-Life Self Assessment – Participants take a short self assessment to help them determine where they currently are in terms of work-life balance. Individual results are compared to industry data.
> Information on Health and Wellness – Using hands on exercises, we will share information and demonstrate some examples of how to monitor one’s own health and wellness and discuss the importance of being healthy and well in order to optimize work-life balance.
> Current Trends in the BPO Industry – We will discuss several key trends in the BPO Industry that have direct impact on work-life balance decision-making.
> Making Good Decisions – Participants will be instructed on various techniques to improve both their own work-life balance decision-making as well as drive for more work-life balance in within the organization.

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Cool Post To Share: 20 Things That Mentally Strong People Don’t Do (Part 1)

http://elitedaily.com/life/motivation/20-things-that-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/

When I read this article it made me think a lot about how I have matured over the years from the brash and idealistic youth to the more seasoned, methodically middle aged person I am now. Thanks to Jen, my amazing assistant, for bringing this to my attention.

1. Dwelling On The Past
Mentally strong individuals focus on the present moment and on the near future. This is something I seem to have been born with, an innate sense of progressing forward.. I’m never satisfied long and always dream the future is brighter.

2. Remaining In Their Comfort Zone
The comfort zone is a dangerous place, a dark abyss where anyone who remains there for too long loses his or herself entirely. This goes hand in hand with #1, seeing life as a journey means sitting still is not healthy. This drives me… A sense of constant discovery.

3. Not Listening To The Opinions Of Others
Only the foolish believe themselves to be sufficient in all regards. When it comes to brainstorming, ideas can’t so much be forced as they can be caught. A very important lesson I learned from watching Star Trek! The captain always surrounds himself with smart people who help him shape his decisions.

4. Avoiding Change
What the mentally strong understand that the mentally weak do not is that change is unavoidable. Trying to avoid the inevitable is pointless. Therefore, trying to avoid change is pointless; it’s a mere waste of time and energy. I’m starting to see how interconnected these habits are… Captains of industry are bold risk takers.

5. Keeping A Closed Mind
You don’t know everything. Even the things you believe yourself to know are likely to not be entirely true. I’ve learned that a big ego is necessary if you want to lead, but it has to be tempered with humility to gather followers. Open minds breed one minds.

6. Letting Others Make Decisions For Them
Only you should be making your own decisions; you can’t allow others to make them for you. If you don’t have the courage to fail, then you don’t have the courage to succeed. This is so hard to teach, but if you can see the development of this in a person, it’s so amazing. It’s the core belief behind how I train.

7. Getting Jealous Over The Successes Of Others
When others succeed, you should be happy. If they can do it, so can you. If anything, it should motivate you to keep pushing forward. This is really hard for competitive people like me, but I have found this easier as I get older.

8. Thinking About The High Possibility Of Failure
Our thoughts control our perspective; our perspective controls our results. The mentally strong understand this and use this to their advantage. There’s always the chance you may fail, but as long as there is the chance you may succeed, it’s worth trying. Of all my flaws, the one that is also a great strength is this one… I basically think I can do anything I put my mind too.

9. Feeling Sorry For Themselves
Sh*t happens. Life can be hard. People get hurt; others die. Life isn’t all roses and butterflies. You will fall off that horse again and again and again. The question is, are you strong enough to keep getting back on it? Yeah, cowboy up.. It’s the best lesson I ever learned from both my Dad and John Wayne, who in my psyche are kind of the same person.

10. Focusing On Their Weaknesses
Although working on our weaknesses does have its benefits, it’s more important to focus on banking on our strengths. I really got this one when I took the Strengthfinders assessment. It was eye opening to focus more on optimizing what I’m great at and not worrying so much at what I suck at.

To be continued… 11-20 in the next blog post!

Back to Basics – Part 2: Analytics Lead To Data-Driven Decision Making

540Of all the lessons I have learned this past year, one that definitely rings truest is that people who use data in their decision-making always come out on top. Having spent 15 years in an amazingly successful company, it became obvious to me that almost everything being done in the bank has a lot of planning and thought behind it. And much more often than not the planning was both strategically and tactically guided by mountains of data. When I left Wells, there are 30-40 analytics postings on any given day, I just looked recently and there were 120 job postings requiring analytics skills.

Now having spent close to two years working with a wide range of other businesses as a consultant, its clear to me that few businesses have the same will to use data in decision-making. It takes a lot of foresight, tons of planning, and huge amounts of discipline to really get a handle on the data in your business, and very few smaller business are able to develop an analytics culture.

That the 2nd reason behind founding BPO Elite. I identified that the talent gap growing quickly when it comes to analytics training (the first) and I also identified the lack of strong analytics cultures in most businesses (the second). So we set up BPO Elite to train and place talent with these companies in dire need to better analytics.

I am helping a friend prepare a new product he is going to launch for his consulting business. On the surface it seems like a great idea with a decent sized market that should fairly easily make a decent revenue stream. But what does the data say? How big is the market really? What is the ideal price to make the product profitable? How best to market it to the target demographic? Most business leaders take a few hours to conduct actual research and then dive in and start spending money on marketing and product development. And this is where so many go wrong. They never looked deep enough to find the data to answer these questions with a more scientific certainty. So that is where I come in.

Empowering small businesses to make more data-driven decisions is where it all started!

Managing Big Data: The 3 V’s

InfoGraph_2.08I came across this infographic earlier today and loved on of the visuals illustrating the challenges marketing managers have with Big Data. Big Data is all the data you have in your business… customer, product, social media, marketing spend, etc.  Its considered big if you have more of it then you know what to do with.

According to the data gathered, the challenges are:

  1. Variety = The diverse sources of data, the different places is stored and the various applications needed to access it. 49% of the respondents cited this as the biggest challenge. For me variety challenges can be mitigated if you have a good data warehouse approach and have a data master to keep it all inventoried.
  2. Volume = The amount of data in your business that you have to analyze to be able to make decisions.  In the underlying survey, 29% of respondents indicated the sheer amount of data they had to work with is the biggest challenge. The best way to deal with this challenge is to have cutting edge, analytics tools that allow you to mine data quickly. Tableau is my favorite!
  3. Velocity = The speed in which you receive data. It can either be too fast to properly analyze or it can be to slow to be used in your decision-making process. 26% of the respondents indicated that the speed in which they are fed actionable data is their biggest challenge. If you have a way to control the variety and a tool to analyze volumes, then velocity shouldn’t be an issue.

Contact DMAI via this blog or you can e-mail me directly at danmeyer@dmaiph,com to set up an analytics assessment to help you figure out a strategy to control for the variety, volume and velocity in which you use your business data to drive decision-making.