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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Your Risks are in your Assumptions (where they should be)

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 22, 2011

A recent article from McKinsey Quarterly, entitled: “How CFOs can keep strategic decisions on track”, discusses how bias creeps its way into our decision making process, such as Confirmation Bias, searching only for evidence that supports your position and ignoring or discounting evidence that doesn’t, or Anchoring, where we depend [...]

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Stop Me before I Forecast Again!

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|April 8, 2011

From the perspective of the FP&A group trying to support the forecast, there are three major mechanical faults with the process: – There are too many line items to be forecasted efficiently and effectively – The mechanics are too simplistic, too naïve (i.e. a single-driver, Cost-per-Person model) – There is [...]

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Activity-Based Management: The gift that keeps on giving

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|October 20, 2010

In honor of the United Nations World Statistics Day (October 20, 2010), let’s not leave finance out of the party. In fact, let’s continue with our focus from last time on the analytical and decision support payback afforded by Activity-based costing, perhaps the most underappreciated finance tool for adding value [...]

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Your Cutting Edge Tools of the Future

Leo Sadovy
Leo Sadovy|September 17, 2010

When you attend a two-day themed conference, things can get pretty old pretty quickly by the time you get through the sixth speaker on the same subject and sit through the fourth 30-minute vendor commercial. And with a dozen more to follow, is it any wonder that when it’s all [...]

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