Shifting the Balance: Released Today!

My new book, Shifting the Balance: How Top Organizations Beat the Competition by Combining Intuition with Data, is out today. It is available at ecwpress.com/products/shifting-the-balance and at Chapters, Amazon, and your favorite bookseller. Below is a short explanation of why I wrote the book and believe you should check it out.

Starting from the previous harvest, a farmer has to make close to 200 critical decisions every season. There is ten times the number of decisions a company will face when designing a new product or service, while an acquisition might have twenty times that. In IDC's work on digital disruption and industry transformation, I was amazed by how many businesses could not see, did not believe, or made poor decisions that were focused on the short – and not the long term.

To turn an observation into reality, IDC conducted a survey on how data is used in decision-making. What I found was sobering – for example, 51% of CEO strategic decisions are based primarily on gut and intuition. Every day, companies are making decisions that will determine their future without looking at the data.

That stark realization led me to write Shifting the Balance (https://ecwpress.com/products/shifting-the-balance). I talked with over four dozen firms about how they are changing in the big data and AI era and how they fold data with intuition. The story only begins there. My years at IDC have taught me to go beyond what is on the surface and challenge myself to identify the reasons why we realize so much on gut and how the use of data in decision-making can make us more competitive.

Data-driven companies make decisions very differently. I could not have written this book five years ago. In another five years, basing decisions on gut just won't cut it. If you are not, you need to become data-driven quickly. If you already are, you need to use predictive data to prepare and establish a direct connection with your customer to drive engagement.