It’s fine to know how you fall into a business model, how much you made last month, or how much you contributed or sold. But until you learn the power of analytics within the company you run, manage, or work for, you’re missing out on information that enables you to make yourself both highly valued and profitable.
Let’s look at the following example: The average professional gets over 115 emails per day, which basically equates to a traffic jam. If you don’t have something compelling to build value immediately, good luck on having your email read. By learning more about both your customers and employees, you will be able to link analytics with education so that your employees will understand how to present as well as sell. “Compelling” is the most effective adjective to use in today’s information-driven age. In the wild, the orca whale swims with great momentum, at speeds over 55 miles per hour. What happens when you put them into captivity? They are unable to maneuver freely and swim much slower. By understanding analytics, you free yourself to travel at the speed of your own initiative, like an orca in the wild.
Analytics are like a 5-lane highway you drive on, and one that is constantly changing with speed and direction: If you don’t pay attention, you might be stuck in the same lane behind the slowest driver – or even worse, a driver that isn’t paying attention to anything but the conversation he or she is having on the phone while they drive. Utilizing analytics will empower you to understand outcomes, goals, and job performance in order to keep you in the driver’s seat of accurately measuring both time and results.
As technology continually improves, the use of analytics encompasses the entire spectrum of technological advancement – leading to a merger of purely mathematic objective analysis and subjective human connection, or in other words, robots versus relationships. For example, cell phone traffic apps employ analytics to gauge the flow of traffic and accurately create digital measurements that enable drivers to get from point A to point B. Search engines such as Google use robotic algorithms to predict what you want to search for online – thus a robot is analyzing human behavior – and then searching millions of possible results in mere seconds. On an even deeper level of “robots versus relationships”, most popular dating websites utilize pure analytics in the form of computerized robotic algorithms to predict what type of human romantic relationship you may be searching for, based on your given preferences. Another important use of analytics occurs when you strengthen your company’s potential by leveraging your time, resources, and mathematical analyses in order to fully understand the importance of smashing the code to success.
Measuring organizational (or individual) success starts with understanding the projects they can utilize to problem solve, inspect, and continuously build knowledge and confidence from analytics. This equates to analyzing data and then converting that knowledge into action. Analytics is not a trend, it is truly a life science. The difference between past and modern analytics is the speed and quality of data, that shine brightly upon those that embrace numbers to challenge themselves to both learn more and strive higher.
Finding the balance with analytics:
- If you are solely objective driven, then you’ll more than likely miss the boat entirely in terms of building a strong base of followers, employees, or customers. It is imperative to understand how you build value in others, whether they be employees and customers. Unless you are strictly working objectively (such as utilizing data analysis to increase the performance capabilities of a fighter jet), then analytics is a purely research driven process of “trial and error” with clean cut marching orders.
- Numbers can be exciting, and if you don’t think they are then think about something exciting that you are looking forward to in your future. Try to make an estimated measure of the time that will elapse between the current moment and your future excitement. Is there a difference between this and utilizing more formal analytics in a business context? Not really.
Let’s talk about the difference between knowing something and truly understanding it. This depends on a person’s (or a company’s) correctly utilizing procedures that they are responsible for understanding. This is in addition to applicable analytics based on the quantity of time spent on emails, text messages, calls, and meetings – all of which can be continuously measured in order to understand how much time is spent on understanding the extent of problem solving and not getting stuck in a traffic jam, versus flying with continuous forward momentum. The goal? Empowerment to achieve more and faster.
Be very specific about the aim and function of analytics, and how they’re intended to interact and complement the diversification of multiple products or services. This should be a circular force like the rotation of the planet we live on. In other words, analytics should always be quality driven with your company’s values, initiatives, products or processes to build consistency with a constant rotation. This creates structure and ultimately sets the bar for more individual and team training for both recruitment and leadership. Keep in mind that alignment must coincide around how you’re going to drive yourself individually and within management. There is a reason why Ford’s assembly broke the barrier for efficiency and quality.
You can focus on the outcome, but don’t ignore the process of how to get there. Analyze your productivity against your own measurement rubric. It’s a great way to consistently deliver value in yourself quickly and get other people excited. If you follow your own individual analytics combined with your company’s analytics, you will be in the driver’s seat because once you control the road, you control your purpose.
The external challenge is in how we leverage analytics to make internal company performance excel. Solutions come from collaboration with innovators, problem solvers, and analytical companies that merge building value in both their own people and their customers as well. Analytics should be utilized efficiently to create choices for a company’s target market, so that they have a consistently fulfilling experience wherever they choose to engage with a company’s products, services, or employees. Using analytics to understand a customer’s preferences and purchasing habits is an integral key feature of building customer trust in a digital age, which is a paramount factor in the continuing success of any company. At the end of the day, people like to do business (and buy from) people or companies that they know and trust. Remember that objective data analytics alone will not necessarily tell you what’s working on a campaign, or what is resonating with your audience. Data alone will not tell you the reason why a relationship is either improving of failing. It is imperative to find the balance between strictly objective data analysis and subjective human interaction with both a company’s employees and their current or potential customers, in order to bridge the gap between mathematical analytics and human emotions – i.e., robots versus relationships.
Why is this important? Competition in data analysis is becoming extreme. Building talent within yourself, or in an organization, is not difficult if you combine reasoning with analytics. This will bridge good training programs with how you compete in the marketplace. Also, you must have very specific forms of interaction with all team members. In other words, be the part of the organization that actually drives the strategy for both yourself and within the company. This is the art and science to create a convincing argument that creates solutions faster and better. Analytics, and the way you associate analytics with compelling evidence, creates imagination and understanding. If you take your past experiences of trial and error, problems and solutions, and identify analytically on the measurement scale of what works best, you are now building value to incorporate analytics within the framework of your company’s initiatives. The more people you relate to through creating relationships, the easier it will be to absorb information and combine applicable analytics so that it becomes second nature.
One person does not have all the skills, but collaboration among many creates an empire – and that empire could be the one person that is utilizing analytics to achieve anything they set their mind to, because once you see results you will only climb higher and faster.
TIM S. MARSHALL, author of “The Power of Breaking Fear”
