How Intelligent Forecasting Can Lead to Better Decision Making - strategy + business

Peter Drucker once commented that “trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” Though we agree with Drucker that forecasting is hard, managers are constantly asked to predict the future — be it to project future product sales, anticipate company profits, or plan for investment returns. Good forecasts hold the key to good plans. Simply complaining about the difficulty does not help.

Nonetheless, few forecasters receive any formal training, or even expert apprenticeship. Too many companies treat the forecasting process like a carnival game of guessing someone’s weight. And given the frequency of sandbagged (deliberately underestimated) sales forecasts and managed earnings, we even wonder how often the scale is rigged. This lack of attention to the quality of forecasting is a shame, because an effective vehicle for looking ahead can make all the difference in the success of a long-term investment or strategic decision.

Competence in forecasting does not mean being able to predict the future with certainty

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So When Do You Stop The Ideas - WorkAwesome

So you’re about to launch. You’ve done a great job planning and executing this project. And you’re almost ready to unveil your baby to the world. And this is when people start coming up with new ideas and suggestions. Often it’s a major decision maker such as your boss who thinks a new feature or two is needed. Do you rework everything? How do you consider everyone’s feedback and respectfully decline the advice? That all depends on many factors. In the end, you need to decide what’s the gain. And some of that advice comes from someone you can’t ignore.

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Never Mind the Business Model; Here’s the Learning Model - The Heutagogic Archives

I was going to entitle this post after Malcolm McLarens’ keynote at Games-Based Learning in 2009 “Never-Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Txt Pistols” as his talk captures the tension between Innovation and Control that occurs when any new technology enters education. McLaren, like McLuhan, was arguing for the conversational crafting of new creative potentials, something social media makes readily available. The delicious crowd-sourced ideas of #BectaX were arguing for a socialised, participative, learning exchange, roughly speaking, “every learner their own TxT Pistol”. New media, new technologies in fact, create new affordances for disruptive innovation, as they offer new tools and processes for problem-solving. Social media offer the opportunity for the “creativity, innovation and collaboration” of Group Genius to became processes welcomed within educational institutions. We play, we learn, we imagine new futures; the point of course is how do we realise them?

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Creating and communicating meaning: Presentation Zen

What entrepreneurship and the art of presentation have in common is they are both really about creating meaning. This simple fundamental is often forgotten (or was never learned). In business, we need to make money, of course. This is a given. But the focus and the very reason one goes into the business should not be money. This is not because the pursuit of wealth is ignoble, but it may be a signal that one's focus is misplaced. If acquiring wealth is the primary goal of an entrepreneur, ironically the wealth will rarely materialize.

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The Importance of Understanding the Structure of Your Organization - Mintzberg's Organizational Configurations

Financial services firms are known for having tight procedures and rigorous control systems. Staff in design agencies, on the other hand, can sometimes seem to operating as free agents. Big organizations merge to achieve "synergies", but they sometimes also split divisions out into separate, more agile companies. So why are these organizations so different? The reason for this variety is that an organization's structure can make a real difference to the way it performs.

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