Triangles, tools and transformations

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 25, 2012

I have three children in college at the same time.  They are all in the school of engineering, and all attend the same college, which, if nothing else, makes paying the tuition bill convenient.  That’s all I’ll say about that.  My middle child, Weston, is studying to become a mechanical engineer, and [...]

Post a Comment

Conversational analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|March 28, 2012

When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus.  But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than [...]

Post a Comment

The future is not what it used to be

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 15, 2012

Although he later qualified much of what he said with the statement, “I really never said everything I said”, Yogi Berra is also well known for his famous phrase, “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future”. In an attempt to make Yogi’s dilemma slightly more manageable, three of my [...]

Post a Comment

Attack of the 50 foot Cliché!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|December 13, 2011

The role of the CIO is changing. Or was that the CFO? The CEO maybe? Somebody’s role is changing, that much I do know. How many times have you read just such an opening statement in an article or white paper and muttered “duh?” to yourself before moving on to [...]

Post a Comment

Encountering analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|October 19, 2011

In his recent article for the McKinsey Quarterly, entitled “The Second Economy”, W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute states, “In any deep transformation, industries do not so much adopt the new body of technology as encounter it, and as they do they create new ways to profit from [...]

Post a Comment

Where the Cloud meets Strategy

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|July 9, 2011

Operating leverage is the simple idea that an investment in capital equipment, once made, can be “leveraged” to create continually decreasing TOTAL unit costs as volume increases. The fixed costs invested in plant, property and equipment for a production line that were justified on a volume of, say, 100 units [...]

Post a Comment

Go ahead – Make Mistakes!! Business Models and Business Analytics

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|June 21, 2011

Before a new product, service or process is put into mass production, it is standard operating procedure to model the product beforehand during the planning and development phase. There are many reasons for doing so: performance, manufacturability, serviceability, integration, failure mode testing, etc…, but in the end they all really [...]

Post a Comment

A Plethora of Black Swans

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 27, 2011

I was under the impression that Black Swans were supposed to be rare. Rare enough to be effectively non-computable by standard methods. Nassim Taleb’s formulation of the Black Swan Theory is comprised of the three traits of: outlier (rarity), extreme impact, and retrospective predictability (i.e. 20/20 hindsight). I write this [...]

Post a Comment

Data + Context = Business Intelligence

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|May 13, 2011

“Our performance last month was 46.” Oh, you don’t have to thank me, I was just doing my job. Not very well, I might add. 46? 46 what? Or 46 who’s? Without context, 46 is just a number, just data. In context, perhaps that’s 46 out of 48 (not too [...]

Post a Comment

Curling

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|February 27, 2011

Not what you were expecting, was it? You open up a business blog only to find an article about that relatively minor winter sport we only get to see once every four years during the Olympics, two dozen ESPN channels not withstanding. But curling it is, and for good reason. [...]

Post a Comment