Is Your Company Reading Data the Wrong Way?

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We live in an age where we have more data than ever. But most leaders have two strong reactions to new data. Either they rely too heavily on studies or information to make decisions. Or they dismiss outright data that could be very relevant. The better way is learning how to interpret, question, and engage with data and studies, say Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and Johns Hopkins Carey Business School professor Michael Luca. They break down the essential analytical tools to assess and interrogate data to be able to apply it to business decisions. Edmondson and Luca are coauthors of the HBR article "Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Got 30 minutes?
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0:12.6	Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IDEA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:33.0	You're a business owner and you're interested in reaching out to new customers.
0:44.0	You know that data is important.
0:46.0	I mean, that's clear, right?
0:47.5	So you put out a survey into the field asking what kinds of products your ideal customers are looking for.
0:54.8	You get that data back and you have a clear decision made for you as to which direction to
0:59.5	go.
1:00.5	You develop and sell that new product with a big marketing push behind it and it flops
1:06.3	But how can the data be wrong? Today's guests believe in data of course, but they see major ways in which over-reliance or under-reliance on studies
1:16.8	and statistics steer organizations wrong.
1:20.6	They found that leaders often go to one of two extremes, believing that the data at hand is infallible or dismissing it outright.
1:29.0	They've developed a framework for a better way to discuss and process data to interrogate the data at hand.
1:37.0	Michael Luca is a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and Amy Edmondson is a professor at Harvard Business School.
1:44.1	They wrote the HBR article where data-driven decision-making can go wrong.
1:48.8	Welcome, thanks so much to both of you.
1:51.0	Thanks for having us.
1:52.6	Yeah, thank you.
1:53.6	Our business.
	...

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