The other night I saw a great docu-movie called "The Fog of War". It provided a great insight into what happened in the confines of the White House during the early-mid 1960s when the Cold War was at boiling point and US intervention in Vietnam was intensifying exponentially. The docu-movie was centred around Robert McNamara who was the Secretary of Defence during this period, hand picked for the job by JFK. McNamara, as you find out pretty soon after the docu-movie begins, had a brilliant mind. A large portion of the docu-movie focuses on his life and how he came to be the most powerful man in the White-House behind the President.
What does all this have to do with business information? Well, as you find out throughout the docu-movie, McNamara proved time and again during his career that the decisions you make are only as good as the information you base them on. Here is a great example.
During WWII, McNamara served in the US air force as a statistician. During that time, the air force built the new B-29 bomber to replace the older and seemingly less capable B-24. The advantage of the newer aircraft was that it could fly at 23,000 feet, well above the range of Japanese anti-aircraft fire. This meant that the rate of US casualties decreased dramatically, almost to 0%. However, the US was still not making any progress in Japan despite their brand-new weapon. It was McNamara’s job to find out why. What McNamara discovered was that although the B-29 was a far superior plane than the B-24, its accuracy of hitting its targets was greatly diminished due to the greater distance the bombs had to fall. So although US casualties were at an all time low, so was the percentage of targets hit! When the commanding officer of his unit heard this, he promptly ordered the pilots to drop back down to 5000 feet when flying over enemy targets. Predictably, the percentage of targets hit went up, but so did the casualty rate.
Can you imagine what a different story this would have been had the US air force absorbed this information BEFORE they built the B-29, and actually considered the consequences of bombing from higher altitude? I can think of two major possibilities had this information been available much earlier on in the war. The first is that when the B-29 was being built, a team of engineers could have been commissioned to focus on maintaining the accuracy of the bomb-drops despite the increased altitude of the bombers, something that evidently did not take place. This would have cost time and money, but it would have been justified by the rewards. The second is that the air force may have abandoned the whole idea of building this new bomber due to it having little advantage over the B-24, saving the air force millions upon millions of dollars, allowing them to invest in other, more beneficial military initiatives. After all, at 5,000 feet the B-24s were just as accurate as the B-29s!
Now think about your own business. How are you making critical business decisions? What information are you basing your decisions on? For your business to succeed, it is imperative that you understand the information you have, discover the information you don’t yet have and use it all to good effect. Big bucks are at stake and your business data can mean the difference between losing them or making them. Customer behaviour, historical results, sales activity, staff performance, pricing, expenditure and economic variables should all be a part of your decision making process. The data you collect whilst conducting business should not be put to waste, for within it lies great opportunity as well as information that could prevent you from making monolithic business errors!
For assistance in building business and financial data management models to help you better understand your business information, visit the Easy Data Solutions website, or email in**@******************co.il to arrange a free consultation.