Treasure 101 – Decisions & data

  • by

How can decisions be improved and decentralized? What can companies learn from the Olympic Games? What is the Osborne Effect? A treasure full of numbers, facts and figures and almost 30 minutes of reading. But the investment in time promises many exciting insights.

In the last treasure chests, decisions have often been a topic. The Corporate Rebels in Nugget #1 provide practical tips on how to approach the issue. As described in the first tip in the article, you should first analyze existing processes. Are decisions described? If so, who makes decisions? As stated in the article, these are often people who are not directly part of the value chain. Decisions are made by managers, division heads or even board members. That means you have to create a decision briefing. That costs money and time. Think about how many people are involved in the preparation of the decision. In most cases, four- to five-figure personnel costs already come together in this way. In addition there are costs for collecting data. Even more expensive can be the time to make a decision (cost of delay). That can become really high amounts. For example, high quality costs can arise if the decision to improve a product is made too late. If you wait too long with the decision to serve a certain market, this can also be expensive for the company. (5 min, text, English)

https://corporate-rebels.com/distribute-decision-making/

Most of the time, decision templates are about numbers, data and facts. Why it is worth looking at the figures from different perspectives is explained by Michael Schenkel in Nugget #2. I would like to transfer the thought play with the medal table to a concrete example from the enterprise world. Let’s assume you have a list of 100 potential new customers. Your sales team can support a maximum of 10 additional customers. So you have to decide. Also here there are different rankings which can be used for decision making:

  • You sort the list of customers based on their current turnover. The bigger the company, the bigger the possible turnover for your company.
  • You might only be interested in a certain category of customers. So you create a ranking with the sales of the corresponding divisions.
  • You suspect that some of the top 10 are loss-making. So you create a ranking that also takes the profit into account.
  • Analysts predict that the market in Asia will grow by 10%, while it will stagnate in Europe and America. So you create another ranking, which takes this into account.

Which of the rankings do you use as a basis for your decision now? Maybe it would also make sense to look after customer #98, because he is the first in a completely new market segment with huge growth potential. Maybe your time is not spent on generating and analyzing numbers, data and facts. How about ideation and prototyping instead, how to address 100 customers simultaneously with the existing team? (7 min, text, German)

A lot of numbers, data and facts are also available in Nugget #3, an article by Morell Westermann about the future of the automotive industry. What have I learned?

  • The Osborne effect could also be responsible for the declining sales figures in the automotive industry. Because combustion engines are seen as “bad” technology and electric cars are slowly gaining in relevance, car buyers are exercising restraint. If one also considers the boom in alternative mobility concepts such as car sharing, local public transport and e-bikes in large cities, this effect is likely to be even stronger than assumed in the article.
  • I am quite surprised about the price development of power train prices. But if you take a look at how many developers have been working on optimizing the powertrain over the last few years, the figures seem quite plausible to me. Do we become a victim of Pareto and spend an excessive amount of effort on the optimization of the last 20%?
  • Even if some of the assumptions in the article are favorable for the electric car, there is no question for me whether the big drop will come. The question is only when and how deep it will be.

By the way, I see many parallels to the music industry. Sales of CDs in Germany have shrunk from over 100 million CDs in 2009 to 50 million CDs in 2018. In other countries it went even faster. Do we see a similar pattern in car sales? Then the scenario would even look different. What does streaming look like in the field of mobility and who is going to win the race? by the way Vinyl record sales have picked up again in recent years. I could imagine that we will see a similar phenomenon with cars. Good news for companies like Porsche and other premium manufacturers? (16 min, text, German)