Conversational analytics

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 [...]

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Black holes and Integrated Business Planning

Black holes can be completely defined by just three properties; make that four if you count their blackness. The three properties are mass, electric charge and angular momentum. That’s it. No matter what falls into a black hole, the only quantities and qualities retained are its mass, net charge and [...]

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I wonder what the king is doing tonight

Yes, that’s me, as Don Quixote, singing ‘Dulcinea’ from’ Man of La Mancha’ in a Broadway-themed variety show benefit concert (sort of like “Glee” for forty-to-fifty-somethings) raising money for anti-malaria netting in Africa (I did this as a medley along with ‘I, Don Quixote’). The total amount raised was over [...]

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Encountering analytics

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 [...]

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Meet George Jetson - Customer Profitability Optimization

Take a quick look at the two graphs below. Which one appears to be the LEAST complex construction? You might initially suppose it’s the bottom one, nothing but bar graphs, and maybe just one bar graph, the tallest one on the far right, broken into its constituent segments moving towards [...]

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Business Analytics for Value Creation

Welcome to the new internet location for my “Value Alley” blog (same Bat Title, different Bat Channel – remember to bookmark this new site if you are a regular reader. This new WordPress platform should make everything about “The Value Alley” easier for both of us; easier to post and [...]

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Where the Cloud meets Strategy

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 [...]

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