Analytics at Work

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WHAT IT MEANS TO PUTANALYTICS TO WORK

IF WE WANT TO MAKE better decisions and take the right actions, we have to use analytics. Putting analytics to work is about improving performance in key business domains using data and analysis. For too long, managers have relied on their intuition or their “golden gut” to make decisions. For too long, important calls have been based not on data, but on the experience and unaided judgment of the decision maker. Our research suggests that 40 percent of major decisions are based not on facts, but on the manager’s gut. ¹

Sometimes intuitive and experience-based decisions work out well, but often they either go astray or end in disaster: executives pursue mergers and acquisitions to palliate their egos, ...