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Erik: What do you enjoy most about telling stories with data?
Ken: I had this phrase when I was at a previous employer. What I said was I want a game-changing
analysis every quarter. By that I meant I wanted to be able to show a very senior business
leader some analysis, right, some piece of some chart. You think of it as a chart, and
they look at that chart and go 'oh my!' You know, and in some ways, like, in my mind,
you know, there is that oh-*** moment, right, that's what I look for, right. What I really
want is that oh-*** moment where we can tell somebody something about a phenomena, in this
case it's their business, right, but really, what I mean -- you know, as an academic, right,
the thing that I really loved about academics is when you have those moments, right, when
you can -- that's how you have impact, right, when you tell the world something that they
didn't know, when you tell the world something they didn't know about something, right, that
is important. And I mean I could riff on examples of this, not important, but the same thing
applies in business analytics, right. When you show a business leader something about
their business, it's the business dynamics, right. Business dynamics are really hard to
understand because it's this interplay a lot of complicated, a lot of simple things actually,
but like, you know, after you get three simple things interacting, it gets to be really complicated,
right. So, you know, and like our business is actually fairly complicated, so to be able
to -- there are a lot of like intuition about how things work, right. People have kind of
mental models about how much inventory we should hold back, right, or how we should
price things. I mean these are all -- people have made decisions based on their own mental
model. The great thing about analytics is that, you
know, 80% of the time you can show somebody analysis that backs up their intuition, another
10% of the time you show people that, you know, some analytics that supports their intuition
but kind of furthers their thinking, kind of pushes their model and expands it a little
bit, tweaks it, and then 10% of the time, at least in my experience, you stumble upon
something totally new, right, where the business leader had no idea what was really driving
the business. And I mean, in my experience, I have actually been very fortunate, the people
I work with, generally go wow, that's interesting -- where you surprise them. And you get, you
know, good partners who say, you know what, okay, like I believe it, you guys did, you
know, they'll pressure-test you. They'll say look, I'll believe it, let's go down that
route, right, and you get to -- that's why I said game-changing, right, I started all
this off by saying we look for a game-changing analysis. Then one of them would be very surprising;
we'd get a surprising result. You know, you're going along this way, you're going along this
way, you're going along this way, and you say no, no, you gotta stop, and you gotta
go that way, or you just gotta stop, right. That happens fairly frequently in my job,
and those are the moments that you live for because those are the moments where, you know,
at a company like, a company of Turner's scale, you can make -- I don't know if we'll have
a billion dollars of impact, but there are things that we will do that could have 50
million dollars of impact. I'd say that's very possible. Certainly, there are things
that we've done now that have had, you know, in the 15 million-dollar range, so those are
moments that you live for.