Analytics for creating more choices

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 15, 2012

Choice covers both the capacity to control people and events, and an underlying belief in the possibility of such control. Being able to rule your environment gives power to self-determination, even for babies. In a study, researchers attached strings to the arms of infants “as young as four months.” When [...]

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Tried and died. One and done. Learning from failures.

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|May 8, 2012

One of the frustrations I experience is when managers or analysts share with me that their organizations tried to implement progressive management methods, and they either failed or abandoned them. A prominent example is an unsuccessful attempt to implement activity-based costing to measure and manage costs and profit levels of [...]

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Please put the shower curtain inside the bathtub!

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|April 24, 2012

I take risks as a blogger to use blog titles, like this one, that does not indicate the blog’s topic. So many readers will likely not read them. In addition, some of my blog do not contain “keywords” like business analytics for website search engines to detect and drive more [...]

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Analytics takes the thumb off the scale

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|April 10, 2012

When I read an article written by Eric Garland, a strategic analyst, I was disheartened. Garland recently quit his job of 15 years as an analyst, and he expressed his frustration with decision makers in an article published in the Atlantic titled, “How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber.” What [...]

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Business analytics is a big sham and over-rated!

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|April 1, 2012

UPDATE: For anyone who comes across this post later in the year and might have cause for concern, please be sure to read the last paragraph, which includes the punch line for an annual April Fool’s joke that I play on my readers. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Analysts probing rationally integrated limits for [...]

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The waiter eventually arrives with the check

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|March 27, 2012

How long can an organization survive if it keeps making mistakes? How competitive can a company be if its decisions are bad ones? Who wants to have their organization continue to perpetuate making decisions with flawed, misleading, or incomplete information?   Organizations in a “no fact” zone I continue to [...]

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Once unimaginable analytics that are now practical

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|March 20, 2012

The combination of technology and analytics software is solving problems in ways that only a few years ago were unimaginable. Technology’s contribution is with the Internet and high performance computing (HPC). Analytics’ contribution to this marriage with technology is – to keep this simple – the math. It is the [...]

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The perils of analysts demanding perfection and precision

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|March 13, 2012

I refer to myself as a “ready-fire-aim” kind of guy. Although this is an exaggeration, it makes the point that I stop analyzing when the information is good enough to gain insights or make decisions. I am an advocate of the Pareto principle that is also known as the 80–20 [...]

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Analytics based presidential campaigns

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|March 6, 2012

Let me manage your expectations. This brief blog will not take a political position for any candidate or political party. That would be a fast way for me to alienate any reader if I did. What stimulated me to write this piece is the opening sentence of a recent news [...]

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2010 – Old Decade, New Decade

Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins|February 16, 2010

Let’s look back at the last ten years of applying enterprise performance management methodologies, and then speculate about their next ten years. THE PAST DECADE The beginning of this past decade witnessed more experimentation with techniques like strategy maps, balanced scorecards, product and customer profitability analysis, and driver-based budgeting. Much [...]

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