The economy is taking a nosedive. The numbers on the big board are redder than a baboon’s backside. The bank is calling, the customers are vanishing, and the coffee machine is making that gurgling sound again, the one that signals the end of all hope.
And in the boardroom, the big-shots are doing what big-shots do when the water hits their ankles: they are panicking.
Panic is a funny thing. It’s pure emotion. It’s a million years of evolution telling you to either run, hide, or punch the nearest saber-toothed cat right in the whiskers. This is great if you are, in fact, being chased by a saber-toothed cat. It is a terrible, awful, no-good way to run a widget factory.
When we panic, we make emotional decisions. “Fire Gary! He looks shifty!” “Cut the whole marketing budget! It’s just pretty pictures!” “Sell everything! We’ll live in the woods and eat berries!”
Poor bastards. Their brains have turned to soup.
And all the while, the data is sitting right there. It’s on a server in the basement, probably, humming quietly to itself. It’s not panicked. It doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t care if Gary is shifty. It just is.
Data Analytics, you see, is the designated grown-up in a room full of screaming toddlers.
When you are in hard times, you are blind. You are in a dark room, and you know there is a door somewhere, but you are also pretty sure there is a rusty bear trap and a pile of broken glass on the floor. An emotional decision is just running full-tilt into the blackness, praying for the best.
Data analytics is not a crystal ball. It’s not magic. It’s a flashlight. A cheap, plastic flashlight with weak batteries, maybe, but it’s something.
It lets you stop and look.
You turn it on. Click. Oh. Look at that. The numbers say your customers aren’t leaving because of the price. They’re leaving because your shipping partner is run by incompetent clowns, and everything arrives broken. Firing Gary won’t fix that.
Click. Huh. The numbers say that one little product you all forgot about, the green one, is selling like hotcakes in Topeka. Nobody knows why. But it is. Maybe you should make more green ones and less of the blue ones that everyone says they love but nobody ever buys.
Click. The data shows that cutting the marketing budget to zero will, in fact, cause your entire company to become invisible and die in exactly six weeks. But cutting the executive bonuses and the budget for the rooftop koi pond? That would save the same amount of money and hurt exactly nothing except a few egos and some very ornamental fish.
Hard times are for finding blind spots. They are for finding the one safe place to stand while the hurricane rages. Panic won’t find it. Your “gut” won’t find it. Your gut is full of bad coffee and fear.
The numbers will. They are cold, and they are heartless, and they are the only thing you can trust when your own brain is trying to set itself on fire. So stop screaming, sit down, and do the math. And so on.
