Mark Schrutt - Shifting the Balance: How Top Organizations Beat the Competition by Combining Intuition with Data

What if you had the data and information you always wanted and knew what to do with it? What if you could predict upcoming market trends, knew the optimum point to price products, understood the impact of weather on retail shopping before deciding to open a new store, and were sure a certain pitcher would throw inside on a three-and-two pitch? You might change your decision or, at the very least, use these data points to confirm the path you were about to take. Without data, youre moving forward in darkness. While data doesnt guarantee good outcomes regardless of how much you have or how good it is its a whole lot better than trusting the future of your business to pure instinct.

Over 80 percent of executives believe their business will be disrupted by digital technology in the next two years. The same percentage of leaders see data and analytics as the key to their corporate survival. I have been affiliated with International Data Corporation for over a dozen years as a vice-president of research and currently as a strategic advisor in their Canadian offices. Data is the middle name of our corporation and has been since it was founded in the mid-60s. We like to ask all sorts of business and technology questions in surveys and interviews, such as how business leaders use data in decision-making. For example, more than 80 percent of executives believe that data should be at the center of their strategy, yet most are uncomfortable with using data in decision-making and think analytics is too complex.

Admittedly, data can be difficult to access and isnt always current. Numbers on their own tell you little without the effort to drive insight from data. It is not easy, but some executives stand up during meetings and rattle off statistics about growth and market share. There are industries built by data, such as financial services, and those that have been transformed by data, like entertainment with Netflix and travel with Airbnb. Data must play a big role in business decisions but that doesnt mean it currently does.

The sobering reality is that an IDC survey on decision-making in the winter of 2019 found that barely 30 percent of business decisions are made primarily on data. The number dropped to only 20 percent when corporate management was asked about developing strategies and operational decisions. Gut and intuition may have worked for decades, but no longer cut it when customer demands shift with the next tweet or Instagram post, and your industry can be fundamentally changed within a few quarters.

What prompted IDCs research on decision-making in the first place was a meeting I had in the spring of 2018 with the newly hired executive vice-president of digital at Canadas largest newspaper. Having just completed research on corporation innovation and developing a blueprint for the growing trend of creating innovation centers, I had moved my attention towards disruption and how digital technologies were changing industries. I wanted to understand if disruption moved in patterns or phases, from when it may be only a speck on the radar with no impact on numbers, to the point where you are preparing for bankruptcy like Blockbuster and Kodak. I also wanted to understand whether disruption affected different kinds of companies in distinct ways. The answer, I found, is yes. Even a company involved in two or more sectors will see different changes and at particular paces.

The news industry provided me with a perfect proving ground for this research. Companies like the New York Times Company, Gannett, and Torstar Corporation gave me a vast arena to investigate change. The newspaper executive described the painful experience that began at the paper just at the turn of the century through to his arrival, as well as a whole new slate of management, in 2016. Over these 15 years, the newspaper had gone from 5.5 million subscribers to under 3 million, a 15 percent decline in market share for advertising spend, and a market capitalization that once surpassed $2.3 billion to the point where it was trading as a penny stock. What he described were stages of market disruption that the travel and home entertainment industries had gone through and were beginning to rewrite the rules in other sectors. One of the key lessons about disruption is that it happens much faster than it used to.