LESSONS LEARNED FROM AN INSIGHTS GURU
Stan Sthanunathan in his inimitable way shares thoughts on the best way to lead a horse to water, how much budget size matters and his theory of data relativity.
I’ve got three main areas of feedback for my colleagues regarding their responses to the spend and trends survey- what they describe as Weaknesses, what they describe as threats and how they’re thinking about Budget. The responses around Weaknesses and leaders feeling they do not have control over the activation of insights are interesting. You would never have control over activation of insights, but you can play a different role. It makes me think of a metaphor. The slightly more enterprising Insights people will walk the horse to the source of water and say, hey, can you see it is close to you? And an even more enterprising person would take the horse’s mouth and put it in water and say please drink. And the one who is really brave would kick the horse
“On budget; size is not everything. No, it is what you do. The budget is important and there are a lot of clever ways in which you can make your budget have an impact.” and command it to drink. But kicking a horse requires guts because the thing will kick and when it kicks you, it hurts. It makes me think of Henry Rak who used to be head of insights for Kraft. Henry Rak was considered to be a legendary provocateur. Legendary. He created unique approaches. He used to tell the businesses what to do. Regarding the responses around Threats , relatively speaking, there is no more data overload today than what it was 40 years ago. The reason why I use the word relatively, is because it is relative to the computing power. In the good old days, we used to have 8 KB, 16 KB and 64 KB machines and they could only process so much information. Computing power has gone way up, so there is more than enough power to process data. You know this phone that we all carry around that has got more computing
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