Is over reliance on “Data” and “Metrics” justified ?

There is definitely power in figures & numbers as they provide substantially more information to its sponsors about their businesses. They provide a bedrock to devise strategies as well as give form and shape to its success. Strategy can be abstract & subjective but to measure its success, numbers are needed to represent it to make it more comprehensible, be it for making a business more successful, or winning elections or a football competition or measuring customer delight. But many a times, data driven approaches might not be enough to achieve desired outcomes. Businesses can easily lose sight of the strategy and focus strictly on the metrics meant to represent its success. Furthermore, raw data could be easily rigged or manipulated to align to stakeholder demands or feed wokeism. Let us examine some popular stories in different areas to further delve into this.

A.  Corporations

In the corporate world, I mainly see organizations relying solely on data for decision making rather than also relying on their instincts. Often, they are more comfortable analyzing excel sheets and reports to predict future scenarios or forecast firms’ revenue numbers. But the downside of adopting this strategy is that it completely ignores various factors disrupting the industry & businesses like climate change, advancements in technology, societal changes, geo-political situation and probably many more.

For instance, sustainability has recently entered the corporate lexicon and organizations generally tie their business goals to sustainability. But I reckon it is used and projected very “loosely”, largely its impact measured by various metrics to name a few environmental, financial, governance to measure progress & track goals. But in the end, it remains ambiguous to customers as they fail to utilize this data to make informed choices. For example, some airlines include the CO2 emission figures next to the flight no when travelers print their travel itinerary. Such numbers might demonstrate the commitment of an airline to sustainability, but it remains incomprehensible to an ordinary passenger who would be concerned with the availability of other travel details on the itinerary. Such hefty claims could be projected in a much simpler & creative manner to bring more clarity to passengers and ultimately build brand value.

 A gross misinterpretation of overreliance on data in the corporate world is during its annual employee appraisals. Though most organizations employ an ostensibly transparent process, many fail to accurately map the actual performance of employees to the measurement yardstick chosen for them. This can be explained by an organization’s obsession with excel sheets, reports & dashboards which eventually are used to measure employees’ annual performance and their long-term career growth. It may not capture an employees’ subjective qualities like his passion quotient, his judgement skills in convivial or hostile scenarios, his appetite to take risks and above all his in-depth knowledge in diverse areas and how it helped in business growth. This is because most measurement processes rely on convenient tools which process raw data through various algorithms which are ultimately controlled by the organization.

An analogy could be to assume that an autonomous car would make the roads 100% safe as it is controlled by data driven algorithms. But in spite of all the noise and hype created around the autonomous driving technology, it is still NOT mainstream. And to my mind it is so because it is a grueling task for a machine to capture all the possible road scenarios which guarantees 100% safety to everyone on the road. Also, there cannot be fixed parameters for how to quantify safety ie define how “Safe” is considered safe enough to put a self-driving car on the road. To put this another way, computers installed in a self-driving car may be less likely to make errors in the first place avoiding situations like rear-ending, but also less capable than humans in judgement levels if something untoward suddenly happens. The upshot is, it might not be entirely possible ( based on my limited knowledge ) to embed a human mind into a machine readable value that result in a purely driverless experience.

 The corporate world is riddled with such examples where many organizations define the purpose of their businesses before striving for revenue or profit numbers. Tata’s vision as a conglomerate isn’t limited to grow their revenue numbers but to participate in our nation’s growth. Which is why they established TATA Trusts ( ^1 ) just after 25 years of the group’s inception as they wanted to earn and also give back a part of those earnings to society. In fact, the Taj Hotel at Mumbai was the result of Tata’s vision to provide Hotel access to Indians when our country was still under the British Rule. Yes, Tata is a corporate, they run businesses from salt to steel, but at the heart of it is its vision to give back to society. Which is why the social media account of Tata Trust does genuine good in terms of inspiring people and also making them participate in doing social good. It is not at all at the mercy of petty likes, thumbs ups or retweets by its followers as this will ultimately going to be the residue of their strong mission and their noble intentions.

Can their contribution to our nation be measured by any yardstick? Can the basic principles of brand elasticity be applied to calculate the price vs profit equation?  I do not think so. Because in businesses certain attributes would always remain intangible and to my mind can never be represented accurately by an elaborate set of figures.

 B. Cinema

Even the field of performing arts has always been mired in the perennial ‘Qualitative versus Quantitative’ debate .

Take the example of hindi cinema of yesteryear. Back in the day , various elements of a movie like characters, dialogues and music were aimed to advance the social narrative and weren’t there merely for entertainment. Music for example was an inseparable part of the storyline without which the whole plot could get compromised. Why was it so ? I reckon films were considered as “Art Forms” meant not only to entertain the audience but also to highlight social issues prevalent at the time in the society. A case in point could be the 1957 Hindi classic Pyaasa ( ^2 ) directed , produced & acted by the legendary Guru Dutt. It is to this day considered as one of the greatest Hindi film ever made perhaps due to its unconventional theme, bold representation of its lead characters , and its audacious overtones. Pyaasa captures the protagonist’s anguish at the hypocrisy and naked opportunism of the modern world that has no leaning or interest to appreciate his invaluable poetry. The way melody and poetry were used as an effective tool to highlight human psyche and materialism were not only outright brilliant but enough to dazzle the audience with its audacious depiction of society in a newly independent nation. In fact one of its songs "Jinhen Naaz Hai Hind Par" which brutally narrates and accurately represent the deplorable condition of the society was so thought provoking and impactful that it was banned by the then rulers of India. Though the film was jettisoned as anti-government it could still enjoy commercial success at the box office . It also remains as one of the few films in Indian cinema which could blend the artistic flare with commercial success and its uniqueness remains an inspiration to many associated with the craft even today.

Does the fact that “Pyaasa” never won a Filmfare award despite its commercial success belittles its cinematic brilliance and its global cult following ? Does the quantitative aspects of the film ( other than its gross collection ) outweigh its qualitative aspects ? Is it possible for the movie fraternity to create a template involving all the plausible ingredients for future commercial success(s)  of any film?

I reckon its pointless to believe that the richness and depth of any craft ( cinema in this case) can be measured in pure numbers. These and many such masterpieces of Indian cinema cannot remain at the mercy of industry felicitation or their commercial success . In todays parlance the perceived success on social media platforms can join the list . 

I remember during one TV program when this famous Bollywood actor bluntly replied to a question as to why he never won a Filmfare award in spite of his various scintillating on-screen performances and his undeniable contributions to Indian cinema. His response was brutally honest but also sums up the subjective and convenient nature of how success gets measured, how metrics and popularity are deeply intertwined, how easy it is to manipulate the yardstick which measures someone’s achievements! The actor might not have won any awards but perhaps he has already won the hearts of millions of his admirers

 

C. Football

The data obsession sadly has also creeped into sports, and when the sport is the beautiful game of football it certainly affects millions of people.

I remember as a young fan of the sport, I would enjoy the sheer movement of the ball across the pitch , the way players would scramble for control and possession and the simplicity of the way the game was played. There were no fancy graphics, no dashboards, no one capturing the kms covered by each player , no unfathomable heat maps. And yet we would look forward to the game of football like a lifetime event, something that cannot be missed by any mile.

Diego Maradona’s goals against England in 1986 semifinals would always be remembered as one of the BEST as well as the most controversial goals in the history of football . The famous ‘Hand of Goal’ as popularly known to the football connoisseurs and lovers has remained one of the highly debated events and has been critiqued exhaustively . The second goal which the master player scored singlehandedly taking the ball through the midfield , dodging it, injecting substantive guile to mislead the defenders and eventually silencing his detractors by putting it in the back of the net. In today’s corporate world, the statisticians would merely try to capture the quantitative aspects like no of tackles, distance covered, ball speed etc to report this goal scored by Diego Maradona, an Argentinian forward which helped it secure a place in the Finals against West Germany ( Before the unification of Germany ) . The limitation in the statistic would be to capture the craft, the technique, the trickery,cpure brilliance of the South American legend and above all the unbridled joy it gave to millions of football fans around the globe .

What the mathematicians and statisticians fail to understand that the beautiful game of football is still so popular due to its simplicity and the fact that it has a emotional side and not because of the intervention by technology alone. If football is all about scoring goals than the idea of enjoying the beautiful game is simply negated & undermined. It cannot be about science of numbers alone, about the content analytics which makes teams win or lose. This though has been exacerbated by the use of advanced digital tools and complex algorithms to further post mortem the game and more alarmingly the performance of the players. When science monitors each and every move of the players on the pitch, they can inadvertently get conscious of the technology capturing their movement rather than play naturally and use their instincts on the field.

Have we in reality injected too much of metrics into the game which has in fact negatively impacted it , the players and support staff and above all taken the fun out of the whole equation?

On the contrary, I reckon football particularly played during the world cup tournament is very special and enjoyed more as it is a reflection of a team’s culture, their civilizational history and above all their national grand narrative. For example, Spain would like to keep possession whereas Japan would surprise everyone with its never say die attitude on the pitch. Germans would play a more technical game while Serbia would play a more physical game enough to rattle their opponents on the pitch. Such amalgamations of different styles, techniques, culture makes football a beautiful game loved by many, revered by many, worshipped by many and rightly so.

This is the football season; the world cup is in progress as I write this piece. But amidst experiencing the joy akin to the festive spirit, I see this perennial obsession of the organizers & broadcasters with numbers. In reality numerous occasions during this World cup have proved that crunching numbers do not always result in projected outcomes. Take for example the last league match between Japan & Spain in Group E. Though Spain controlled much of the ball during the entire 90+ minutes of the game, and dominated almost 80% of the possession , it was Japan who won the match 2-1 . Football experts and Television presenters merely parroted the data made available to them by the broadcasters but they simply misread the tea leaves. This was because there was no available data which could measure Japan’s resilience, its grit and its indomitable spirit to compete. And this wasn’t the only case when the predictions of these so called experts and connoisseurs went wrong in this very World Cup. Who’d have thought that a Maghreb Arab country would become the first Arab-African team to reach the semis of the World cup. This to my mind happened as most of the predictions were made on the basis of historical data and figures which do not always accurately represent and place things in the right perspective.

Conclusion

Data & metrics are no doubt important to devise and measure strategy but it must be complemented by human instincts. We have seen over reliance on Data & Metrics resulting in knowledge gaps & lack of judgement during elections, during performance appraisals, while reporting out sales figures, in sports and in many more areas.

Since data is always “backward looking”, any attempt to plainly extrapolate it to a wishful outcome will be considered to satisfy the confirmation bias of stakeholders and feed the omnipresent populism. On the other hand, data loaded with contextual details and nuances which depicts accurate information would always be valued over glorified figures , convenient numbers and future condescension to make everyone happy .

After all there is a difference between ‘data’ and ‘content’ !

Do fearless employees exist in today’s corporate world ? by Samarth Gupta

 

                                                               Image Courtesy - cnbc.com

When I started my professional career I believed that hard work and integrity are some of the few critical qualities for growth in any organization . But if I look back now at my professional career serving the Indian as well as the global organizations, I find that the most fitting & universally perceived mantra for corporate success by some of the employees is to “suck up” to one’s superiors, to say the convenient things, to appease and please them lest they give them a meagre salary increment or overlook them for that next promotion .This tribe of employees are willfully ready to sacrifice their soul trying to appease or grab the next available opportunity to prove their worth to their superiors. This behavior can be explained if seen through the eyes of employees being goal oriented whether professional or sometimes personal , but I reckon this phenomenon may have a lot to do with our country’s chequered past .


The grandeur of Indian civilization 

What we need to understand is that unlike most of the countries in the west and elsewhere, our nation is part of an old and continuing civilization, it has a history , its present culture is rooted in its values and a gloried past. Our way of life has a scientific and spiritual dimension to it and is not merely an imported concept from elsewhere.

In fact, India has always been the source of knowledge to the world since recorded history thru early medieval times. Its contributions in areas like architecture, science, mathematics, literature, philosophy and on and on has remained unparalleled largely acknowledged by scholars and scientists globally. Some of the earliest architectural feats in the form of Hindu temples of Thanjavur & Mahabalipuram in India to Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia and other temples in Bali, Indonesia bears a perfect testimony to our sophisticated and golden past .

Indian universities like Takshila and Nalanda were akin to some of the ivy league universities of today like Harvard or Princeton as they were considered prestigious centers of higher education that attracted the cream of foreign students from Eurasia .In fact Nalanda University attracted scholars from different parts of the country as well as world. The Chinese scholars I-Qing and Xuan Zang who visited Nalanda in the 7th century have given vivid accounts of the discourses which happened on a daily basis, primarily through the methods of debate and discussions which was the considered an effective method for their quest for knowledge during this period .^1

The 8th century AD Indian philosopher & theologian Shankara ( also known as Adi Shankaracharya ) attempted to unite the fragmented land of India at the time through his famously revered debating methods covering the topics around philosophy, poetry and pilgrimage . He’d win over his spiritual opponents by challenging them , understanding their perspectives and responding with logic and merit ! Some of the events and teachings in Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit epic which still holds relevance today in our lives, is filled with provocative and uniquely disruptive concepts that are antithetical to the convenient human thought of today . It presents ideas which in today’s parlance could be considered so confrontational and rebellious that it keeps one wondering how the inheritors of such a civilization today are so complacent, risk averse, disoriented and unwilling to fight for a cause , both in their social as well as in the work life.

In the last century , Steve Jobs challenged the way people used computers and phones, he radically shifted the perception of a computing machine to a desirable object . Which is why people line up outside Apple stores to buy their newly launched products in spite of hefty price tags . The transformation of the global automotive industry led by the industry’s efforts to mitigate effects of Climate Change and the way the hegemony of fossil fuel powered vehicles have been challenged by the recent popularity of electric vehicles , or the way mainstream on-premise computing has been challenged by the scalability & accessibility of cloud computing which is radically transforming the business processes of thousands of companies , are some of the other examples where the incumbent business models have been challenged already by disruptive forces .



Why Employees do not stand up to their corporate masters

It takes courage to stand up to any incumbent leadership or challenge the efficacy of an existing business model or an organizational culture. If there is some merit in analyzing the latest trends mentioned above, challenging and creating controversy is required to achieve greater impact and realizing some of the greatest industry transformations. But in spite of this employees do not stand up and say the “Right’ thing ? Sadly, as we learnt through the written records that, though India once known for its debating tradition and using it as an effective tool for learning and knowledge dissemination, it has been very conveniently dispensed with in present times. Its history of colonization by foreign powers completely transformed its culture, its belief system and most importantly its way of life. Through numerous tomes and treatises we learn about the loot and plunder of its wealth by various invaders and colonizers either by use of force or by manipulation & guile. Though India attained freedom in the mid-20th century, this colonial era left an indelible mark on people’s minds which still shapes their behavior and ideology both in public and private life. The 'Mai Baap' culture as an aftermath of the colonial Raj has deeply scarred the Indian society. We are too eager to please ‘others’ than say the right things, making us more or less ‘Escapists’ than “Challengers’ , ‘risk averse’ than ‘risk takers’. We’re too micro-optimized to make our own lives comfortable at the cost of undermining our culture, values and principles. This might closely explain to a certain extent why people in the corporate world easily crumble under the weight of social and peer pressures to give in and conform to their superiors . They do not want to challenge anything which appears powerful as they see it as a threat to their little comfortable corporate lives, or their well-guarded public image or sometimes fear of reprisals. They easily consider a battle ‘lost’ without even trying. Because years of slavery & subjugation have taught us that challenging our superiors would create controversy and controversy can lead to punishment and in an ideal world punishment is best avoided.I strongly believe that contrarian and dissenting views should be rewarded NOT punished. But contrary to my belief , we are seeing that , even with all our history and troubled past if at all few people with contrarian views muster up courage and stand up for the ‘right’ thing they are either punished heavily or blatantly ostracized . Idioms like “My way or the Highway” Or “ Boss is always right” have inadvertently entered the corporate lexicon not without a reason and are fluidly used because employees have allowed themselves to get subjugated by their superiors .Corporations too encourage transformational initiatives to the point where it does not challenge the status quo or the convenient zones that the executives have built around them . Mostly they remain a matter of appearing ‘too cool’ in the eyes of fellow employees or in the public domain. In some cultures ,when confronted , the incumbents and influential people within an organization can form a clique and hence operate like a single unit since they do not want to get challenged or be told the 'right' thing .And if some employee(s) do speak up either they are blatantly ignored or detested or taken to task within the bounds of organization's policies .An organization with a toxic culture may find ways & means to reprimand an "outspoken" or a ‘whistleblower’ employee which mostly explains the reason for the employees' convenient silence! Largely employees would not risk their jobs to defend their uniquely radical and provocative themed point of views. The fear of losing their jobs or impeding their career takes over their hearts and minds. As the famous Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurthy once said that " One is never afraid of the unknown ; one is afraid of the known coming to an end ! " Needless to underline the importance of the “known” here !

This hypocrisy to say the “convenient” things , to not create a controversy and remain popular in the eyes of the superiors only builds conformity and linear thinking , but it also hampers the development and refinement of the human spirit .

But sadly even employees have learnt to stay on the sunny side of things. They’ve learnt the art to exploit the vagaries of the corporate world and make things work in their favor . They also know that grabbing eyeballs are more important than achieving something on the back of hard work and integrity , that in today’s corporate world charisma outshines competence in most of the cases . In a research it has been studied that irrelevant attributes such as employees’ attractiveness, his physique, skin color, height etc in reality makes him more relevant in the corporate world and very likely to help him advance his career faster than his peers. This is noteworthy as notwithstanding a raft of research by management schools , it is very clear how easy it is to influence people in the corporate world . ^2

Conclusion

Employees are not expected to be undaunted rebels , challenging their corporate masters and treating them the way revolutionaries in the past have treated dictatorial and autocratic forms of govt in a coup d’etat or people’s revolution. But it is very important that they feel safe to stand up and defend their values , their point of views , stand up against any malpractice or discrimination at workplace. As shared previously , India achieved excellence in various fields like architecture , sculpture, literature in the early medieval period as it was free from any existential threat posed by foreign colonizers and enemies . There was no risk to its culture or identity and as a result this period filled with creativity ,imagination & ingenuity led people to create some remarkable works in myriad fields . Though History cannot be rewritten and we cannot obliterate our past , but the learnings can be adopted mainly in the corporate world . They should reflect on this phenomenon and human behavior to provide an environment to their employees free from any reprisal threats or retribution. It is important to understand the value of freethinking and an unfettered mind , a mind which is not engulfed by fear or colonized ideologically or intellectually . Only then , they would be able to foster a culture of creativity and prepare their employees to embrace challenges in the wake of any unforeseen or natural adversities . Courageous employees should be given comfort levels and encouraged to voice their dissent as they can come up with innovative business strategies or creative solutions to various problems. The freedom, frankness and fearlessness of employees should receive an honest pat and rewarded accordingly. It’s the employees who should be at the heart of any organization, any brand or a business conglomerate and not physical offices , digital assets or manufacturing set ups . It’s employees who can drive passion , they are the ones who can inspire and crystal ball gaze to prepare an organization for the future, they are the ones who can build shareholder value on stock exchange and above all respect for an organization. All this would be possible only if the same employee feels fearless and psychologically safe while serving his organization .

Disclaimer : Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

 NOTES

^1 https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/heih111.pdf

^2  Persuasion—and Resistance by Eben Harrell From the Harvard Review Magazine (November–December 2019) ; Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why, by the consultant Stephen Martin and researcher Joseph Marks