Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

This data, as it turns out, is very loud. It shouts at you to focus on it and prioritize it and improve it. It’s easy to track and measure and is usually seen as a proxy for how well the manager is doing his job. This is a subtle but transformational shift in perspective, and it feels good to migrate from the unstructured messiness of passive data to the reassuringly concrete active data. But what feels like progress can prove to be poison if it leads managers to mistake the model of reality that active data offers for the real world.5 Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world. Too often, managers conveniently set this knowledge aside: data is man-made. As data about operations broadcasts itself loudly and clearly, it’s all too easy—especially as the filtering layers of an organization increase—for managers to start managing the numbers instead of the job.