CDOQ

A culture that eats strategy for breakfast, eventually dies of indigestion. 

It is harder to reimagine what exists than to imagine what does not exist. 

At the end of 2019, I wrote down the list of societal trends I had been noticing over the years because I wanted to actively observe these trends in 2020. A pandemic happened in 2020 and we are still living in it. Surprisingly, almost all trends (19 out of 20) are still continuing. Following are my Y ear E nd of 2020 U pdates (YE2020U; all new 2020 text is in blue) to the trends.  ----- 2019 is coming to an end and continuing my quest to better understand human behavior, I wrote down the twenty trends I have been noticing for a few years. It would be interesting to observe these trends in 2020 to see how they evolve and if they achieve wider adoption. There are multiple reasons why these trends have emerged but in this article we will only look at what the trends are. Unless specified, the trends are for the US.  Source: Wikipedia  Here they are:  1. Phone calls on decline:   Millennials  and post-millenials do not talk on the phone much. They prefer text ...

The underlying assumption in data-based decision making is that the future will be the continuation of the past. The big companies have all the data in the world and somehow meaningful innovation comes out of startups which are based on the founders' believes, intuition, or curiosity. All data is about the past including the data about the future, which is more of an opinion than fact. Does that mean we ignore data? No. Understand the data about the data. Where does it come from? When and how it was collected? Is it showing causation? Do we understand the interconnectedness of all variables? etc. And then, use data as one of the inputs in decision making.  Was controlled fire invented based on data? :) 

Ironically, the most objective television news available in America, the most powerful country in the world and  a leading democracy,  is from a TV news channel, Al Jazeera , owned by the Qatar government, which is a monarchy and the country's GDP is almost half of Amazon's annual revenue.