Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Q3 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Many of you aren’t just engaged in providing advice to your clients. You also run your advisory business.
Given your background and training, you may believe data is superior to instinct when you’re confronted with challenging decisions.
Recent studies question this assumption.
Corporate Blunders
We have an image of corporate management being laser focused on the bottom line, making decisions that relentlessly generate profits for their shareholders.
While this is often true, there’s a history of massive blunders that cause you to scratch your head and ask how anyone could be that stupid.
Here as some examples:
- Decca records turned down the Beatles.
- A small search engine called Excite turned down an offer to buy Google for $750,000. Google now has a market cap of over $1 trillion.
- Ross Perot, one of the shrewdest and most successful executives in the world, turned down an offer to buy Microsoft for $40-$60 billion.
- Blockbuster declined to buy Netflix for $50 million. Its CEO didn’t believe online businesses were “sustainable.”
- Western Union could have purchased the patent for the telephone. It believed the future of communication was the telegraph.
- Atari rejected an offer to buy Apple’s personal computers.
The focus on more data
More data is all the rage. An article in the Harvard Business Review opined that “[T]hriving as a mainstream company today means being data driven.”
Big companies are paying heed.
A recent survey found that 92% attribute their “principal challenge to becoming data-driven”. The authors of the study concluded these results “strongly suggest the need for change in the focus of data executives toward programs that address data culture, literacy, and decision-making – even at the expense of technology initiatives.”
Should you rush to jump on the data bandwagon?
Read the full article here by Dan Solin, Advisors Perspectives
