Roger Martin wrote an article titled A Dangerous Schism: Your Strategy Course is Utterly Inconsistent with your Statistics Course (8 May 2023).
« The overwhelming majority of time in business, the future is different… from the past. Therefore, any inference that you draw from data analysis — which is inevitably about the past — to utilize in making a decision about the future is fundamentally flawed. »
« First it teaches students to be wildly overconfident. They feel confident in taking decisive action on the basis of their scientifically rigorous data analysis. Then the world changes — which their analysis convinced them (implicitly) that it wouldn’t, and they get annihilated by a competitor who wasn’t similarly clueless and overconfident — and remember it only takes one more thoughtful and nuanced competitor. »
« Second, and seemingly contradictory but not in fact, they become massively conservative. Analysis will never provide evidence that something new and different will succeed because that is an impossible conclusion to draw from analysis of past data. It will, in fact, buttress the notion that what is happening now will continue to happen in the future — because that is all data analysis can do. »
Roger L. Martin is the author or Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works and When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency
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