正如設(shè)計界的思想家羅杰?馬丁所言，領(lǐng)袖需要“兼聽則明”。評價21世紀的商界領(lǐng)袖，不再看他/她能排除多少不確定性，而要看他/她能忍受多少不確定性。
大數(shù)據(jù)不敵直覺力。
數(shù)據(jù)也許能預(yù)測新問題，也許能找到已知問題的新解決辦法，不過只有人類的直覺和巧妙心思才能提出開創(chuàng)性的新想法。這是獨一無二的人類天賦——它遠遠超過解決一個問題，超過滿足某個功能需求的層次。
同樣的，如果我們量化所有的人際關(guān)系，就無法給人類的判斷力留下任何回旋余地。因為我們常常把對人們的感覺和他們的行為混合在一起，我們的判斷力比二進制數(shù)字更加復(fù)雜。它意味著我們可以對雙重行為有著更細微的評估和反應(yīng)，我們可以選擇將失敗視為創(chuàng)新的先決條件。很難想象，如果我們喪失原諒的能力，如何還能朝著任何目標前進。
讓我們抵抗沖向數(shù)據(jù)的欲望，花時間沉住氣，必要時再加快步伐。讓我們允許自己不時從數(shù)據(jù)中解脫出來，去思考什么才是真正重要的東西。讓我們用數(shù)據(jù)來講述自己故事，但不要讓數(shù)據(jù)成為我們唯一的故事。
Big Data is big business. Sensors, GPS tracking, math modeling, and artificial intelligence offer companies real-time market insights at massive scale and open the door to unprecedented ways of monitoring, targeting, and measuring employees and customers. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that enterprises adopting Big Data technologies will “outperform competitors by 20 percent in every available financial metric.”
Big Data might well be “the new oil,” but I would caution us not to worship it as the new religion. Amidst all the data frenzy, we are not only losing a more holistic view of business but also a part of our humanity. How much space do we leave for creativity if we equate better living with better algorithms?
I am not a dataphobe, but I am concerned about relying only on data. I am not against quantitative metrics, but I question their authority as the main indicators of business performance, prosperous societies, and meaningful lives.
Big Data comes with many benefits, but let’s complement it with Big Intuition. Here are six reasons why:
Big Data = http://www.36dsj.com/archives/Big Brother? The New York Times’ Steve Lohr describes Big Data as a descendant of Taylor’s “scientific management.” Instead of performance in the workplace, which was the focus of Taylorism, we are now measuring happiness and well being, our consumption preferences, social interactions, physical activities, our attitudes, moods, emotions, behaviors, and bodily functions — in other words, we are measuring our lives.
Sure, to some degree, “quantified self” apps may empower people to take more control over their decisions. However, by doing so, we are opening up once-private terrain to the business world, all under the mandate of self-improvement.
Big Data is not social. We humans are social animals. Research shows that relationships, especially friendship and marriage, are key factors of happiness and fulfillment. Our brains are wired to care, and our hearts and minds have developed an astounding capacity to empathize and sympathize with fellow humans. We can show compassion, sense mood swings, detect subtle non-verbal cues, tolerate or embrace, accept and reject, love and hurt, experience with all of our senses, act irrationally, and lose our self-control. These key traits of our humanity are threatened by the “mathematization of subjectivity,” as Leon Wieseltier calls it.
Recent social genomics studies suggest that not only our productivity, but also our evolutionary capacity to connect with others is diminished by digital overload.
Big Data creates small worlds. Morality is gained by way of empathy. Paradoxically, in our age of hyper-connectivity we are increasingly facing the challenge of connecting with people whose opinions, values, beliefs, faith, and culture may be unlike ours. As digital technology customizes our social experiences, online and offline, based on our preferences, we are increasingly stuck in our own worlds — the “Filter Bubble,” as Eli Pariser called it, designed by smart algorithms to serve us with content, culture, and company that we are already familiar with and that fall squarely within our comfort zones. We don’t “like” the people and things that are unlike us, feeding a vicious cycle of social and cultural narrow-mindedness.
Big Data makes us smarter, not wiser. Our data-driven worlds are not only becoming smaller, they are becoming faster. The real-time flow of information persuades us to react to feedback constantly and instantly. Playing on the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, Douglas Rushkoff calls our current state-of-mind Present Shock, lamenting “a diminishment of everything that isn’t happening right now — and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.”