Speed and Information
I’ve been trying to get around to reading this book, “It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small…It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business” by Jennings and Haughton. It’s a “how to” on fast thinking, fast decisions, getting to market faster and sustaining the speed. Topics that are very attractive to me in my little corner of the internet… 8-)
They profile some great speed success stories, among them Clear Channel Communications, AOL and Charles Schwab. An interesting excerpt below:
Clear Channel Communcations. In less than a decade, this Texas firm became the bigget out-of-home media company in the world. From 14 radio stations to almost 1,000… From zero billboards to nearly 600,000. They use a unique central scoreboard to keep adding business units faster than anyone else.
Nice. I really like the “central scoreboard” concept. How much faster are they in planning and responding to threats and opportunities because of that scoreboard? I wonder if it’s a numerical or visual representation?
At my dayjob, Tocquigny, we are exploring the “business metrics dashboard” concept to help our clients measure and manage complex data sources aggregated into one manipulatable visual device. We see our clients trying to deal with the speed of media and marketing change, and the increased complexity of channels. How can a time-pressed marketer or CMO really keep on top of the massive amounts of data coming at them, and still respond with speed? There are likely many answers, (like not sleeping!) but I think that aggregating multiple data sources into one dashboard that not only shows measurements but allows manipulation is one key way.
Of course any such dashboard would have to be a masterpiece of information design… To quote Edward Tufte, a leader in the information design field:
Modern data graphics can do much more than simply substitue for small statistical tables. At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information. Often the most effective way to describe, explore and summarize as a set of numbers - even a very large set - is to look at pictures of those numbers. Furthermore, of all methods of analyzing and communicating statistical information, well-designed data graphics are usually the simplest and at the same time the most powerful.
To me, moving fast with confidence is really about having the right data to make decisions… Sometimes you have to make assumptions of course, but information is power.
How are you visualizing your business’ key data? What else could you learn if you looked at the same information in a new way?
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