（2014.01.13）

（编者按语：今天给大家推荐一篇非常好的英文文章。本人的翻译能力较弱，只好委屈大家看看原文。如果有好事者愿意将其译成中文，我将不尽感激。）

在全国上下为“大数据时代”感到兴奋不已时，德鲁克又为此hype敲响了警钟。也许人们还记的十几年前的“千年虫”，多少企业为那次的hype付出了巨大的代价？在一个强调“颠覆性”创新的时代，“直觉”（Intuition）是非常重要的能力。大数据提供的是“后视镜”的数据，直觉是创造未来的能力。未来的数据尚未出现，不存在的数据如何分析？再者说，如果大家都依赖数据分析过日子，那么如何建立远见，洞察力，未雨绸缪的能力？真正的创新能力又从何而来？

Intuition and Interaction: The Two Keys to Winning With Big Data

Posted on Jan 9, 2014 | 4 Comments
Here is this month’s piece from Brand Velocity, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that is putting Peter Drucker’s ideas into practice at major corporations.

The perpetual Peter Drucker “insight-lag effect” has occurred again.

As the business world tries to gets its head around the explosion of Big Data, Drucker’s words from more than 25 years ago ring louder than ever: “Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose,” he wrote. “Converting data into information thus requires knowledge.”

In other words, Big Data is meaningless in and of itself. The trick is to turn the reams of facts and figures now available in our hyper-connected world into truly useful information—information that can help your company decide what to stop doing, what areas of strength to build upon and expand, and what to start doing.

The businesses that have figured out how to do this clearly have an advantage. The management consultancy Bain recently found that companies with the most advanced analytics capabilities are twice as likely to be in the top quartile of their industry in terms of financial performance and five times more likely to make faster decisions.

But how do companies develop such capabilities? From what we’ve seen with our clients, two important factors are at play.

First, executives need to embrace that “data-driven” does not mean letting go of one’s intuition. Instead, an individual manager’s views on business and the world should drive the process of formulating hypotheses that, in turn, should be confirmed or invalidated by data analysis.

Second, executives need to interact directly with data. To keep up with the surge of business information, corporations have increased the complexity of the tools used to process it. As a result, decision makers are being left out from interacting with the data themselves.

To succeed, IT and analytics experts must provide decision makers with simpler tools that enable these executives to wrestle with the numbers, allowing them to get answers to key business questions and test their assumptions.

More of a Drucker-like approach will produce three advantages. First, it will encourage leaders to trust their intuition, something they have relied on for decades to get them to the executive suite. Second, building on Drucker’s call to “engage in analysis and diagnosis,” decision makers will themselves be placed behind the data wheel.

Finally, capitalizing on intuition and a simplified interface will allow companies to fail and succeed more quickly—a key for winning in the 21st Century.