Tag Archives: Data-Driven Decision-Making

Harvard Business Review – November/December 2024

November–December 2024

Harvard Business Review (October 22, 2024) – The latest issue features:

Why Employees Quit

New research points to some surprising answers. 

Summary.   

The so-called war for talent is still raging. But in that fight, employers continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades. Why? Because they’ve been so focused on challenges such as poaching by industry rivals, competing in tight labor markets, and responding to relentless cost-cutting pressures that they haven’t addressed a more fundamental problem: the widespread failure to provide sustainable work experiences. To stick around and give their best, people need meaningful work, managers and colleagues who value and trust them, and opportunities to advance in their careers, the authors say. By supporting employees in their individual quests for progress while also meeting the organization’s needs, managers can create employee experiences that are mutually beneficial and sustaining.

Personalization Done Right

The five dimensions to consider—and how AI can help

Summary.   

More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like.

Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024). Drawing on decades of work consulting on the personalization efforts of hundreds of large companies, they have built the defining metric to quantify personalization maturity: the Personalization Index. It is a single score from 0 to 100 that measures how well companies deliver on the five promises they implicitly make to customers when they personalize an interaction.

The authors argue that personalization will be the most exciting and most profitable outcome of the emerging AI boom. They describe how companies can use AI to create and continually refine personalized experiences at scale—empowering customers to get what they want faster, cheaper, or more easily. And they show readers how to assess their own business’s index score.

Design Products That Won’t Become Obsolete

Harvard Business Review – September/October 2024

September–October 2024

Harvard Business Review (August 12, 2024) – The latest issue features Embracing Gen AI at Work: How to get what you need from this new technology…

Tom Brady on the Art of Leading Teammates

In this article, NFL great Tom Brady and Nitin Nohria, of Harvard Business School, present a set of principles that people in any realm can apply to help teams successfully work together toward common goals.close

When our society talks about success, we tend to focus on individual success. We obsess about who is the “greatest of all time,” who is most responsible for a win, or what players or coaches a team might add next season to become even better.

Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong

Let’s say you’re leading a meeting about the hourly pay of your company’s warehouse employees. For several years it has automatically been increased by small amounts to keep up with inflation. Citing a study of a large company that found that higher pay improved productivity so much that it boosted profits, someone on your team advocates for a different approach: a substantial raise of $2 an hour for all workers in the warehouse. What would you do?

AI Won’t Give You a New Sustainable Advantage

History has shown that technological innovation can profoundly change how business is conducted. The steam engine in the 1700s, the electric motor in the 1800s, the personal computer in the 1970s—each transformed many sectors of the economy, unlocking enormous value in the process. But relatively few of these and other technologies went on to become direct sources of sustained competitive advantage for the companies that deployed them, precisely because their effects were so profound and so widespread that virtually every enterprise was compelled to adopt them. Moreover, in many cases they eliminated the advantages that incumbents had enjoyed, allowing new competitors to enter previously stable markets.