article thumbnail

Companies Collect Competitive Intelligence, but Don’t Use It

Harvard Business Review

The second requirement is to anticipate response to your competitive moves so that they are not derailed by unexpected reactions. In my experience, the competitive perspective is almost always the least important aspect in managerial decision-making. How can companies achieve that? That’s just common sense, too.

article thumbnail

How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts

Harvard Business Review

If you want to put analytics to work and build a more analytical organization, you need two cadres of employees: Analytics professionals to mine and prepare data, perform statistical operations, build models, and program the surrounding business applications. million business people with the know-how to put big data analytics to use.

How To 8
article thumbnail

Managing Risks Means Managing Arguments

Harvard Business Review

Managing risks — especially the hard-to-pin-down, moving-target risks that any financial trading operation has to cope with — inevitably involves arguing. You probably do want to accord different weights to the arguments of different people, although deciding how to do so (past track record? clarity of argument?)