The Informed Company

Introduction

Knowledge is power. Knowing more about your surroundings, like which fruit is safe to eat and which will harm you, keeps us safe and successful. Knowing more about the relationships between events, like the inverse relationship between washing hands and influenza outbreaks, minimizes inevitable difficulties. And knowing which strategies lead to success, like which mass‐reforestation strategies lead to sustainable ecosystems, helps us optimize our efforts. In the modern world information on our environment is often in the form of data.

Whether by an individual or a team, data used intentionally and critically is a key part of success. While it's true that anyone can get lucky and stumble upon the right answer, having an idea of which tactics confer the most stability or which metrics indicate big opportunities for growth can drive teams forward quicker.

Our thesis is this: being informed implies being successful. But what does it mean for a person or an organization to be informed exactly? If you are sufficiently informed, you can make decisions with a sense of conviction that your thinking is correct a majority of the time. In the end, your gut feeling (intuition) factors into decision making. However, with well‐organized and accessible information added into the mix, your “gut” can make more thoughtful (and better) decisions.

On the other hand, bad decisions are the result of not knowing enough: not knowing the root causes of numeric anomalies, not knowing where ...