Managing Your Business Requires Data, Mind and Heart, Part 2

Should a company make all of its important decisions based solely on data? Or is there more that is required in formulating your strategic business plan, implementing your corporate vision, and answering challenging questions that you face on a daily basis? Following is Part 2 of an interview with Heine Krog Iversen, CEO of TimeXtender, in which he discusses the notion of running organizations and making important business decisions based not only on data, but also with your mind and heart. Part 1 can be found here.

Elaborate on what it means to you to use your mind for decision-making?

Mind is a combination of business experience, whole-life experience, education, training, decision-making skills and intelligence. When you have to map out a strategy and a plan you use your mind. Also, with your mind, you have the insight on what data to use, what to put into documents/reports/dashboards, and the know-how to think, read information, comprehend all the information and put it into action. You have the ability to crunch numbers and take the most from them. Sometimes we call this “the professor in you.” Your mind lets you think through a strategy from start to finish.

And what about using your heart?

Heart is an intersection of instincts, intuition, thoughts, passion, commitment, interests and beliefs. It’s what some call having a “gut feeling.” It can be having the ability to evaluate the scenario and all its parts it in your head, but then having the foresight of where you want to go and having the trust to believe in your direction. With heart, you can argue your points with strong opinions. Heart is something you believe in. It keeps you fighting through uphill battles.

What do you do when the data points you in one direction and your mind and heart in another?

This is where the term “they set their mind to it” comes into play. In this case, there’s something they have extraordinary passion about that triggers them to strongly believe in it. However, some may even believe so strongly that they become stubborn and completely disregard what any data tells them. With mind and heart, our vision and our passion, we are committed to overcome what the future might present, but we do look at the data to get a better understanding and awareness.  While we appreciate the data, we also believe what our mind and heart tell us.

Companies have data and that data helps tell them what to do, how to invest and which direction to go. The heart says, “OK, but let’s go in this direction,” so then I need to use my mind. This is where the strategy comes into play. You use data to help build out the strategy and plans, but the data is not the strategy – the plan is the guiding light of which data is a supporting component. When building out strategy, you have to use your mind and your heart. I don’t want to be in a business that I’m not passionate about. In essence, you use your mind and heart to look into the future and help make your vision come true.

A business user has retrieved all the charts, graphs and reports needed to make an important decision. Now the user wants to add in mind and heart to help. How should they proceed?

I don’t envision this is how it looks in real life. The mind and heart have insight as well, but the company has a strategy and a market. The company has a leader who has a plan and a style for that market. There’s someone at the company who has set guiding principles and how to use the data. Data can be refactored, reevaluate, interpreted and massaged as well – it’s not like it’s always concrete.

So, here’s what you might have. You have a vision and supporting strategy. You make decisions with data, mind and heart. You have the historical data that you need, but now you need to narrow it down to a smaller sample. One strategy dimension could be how you treat or help customers. Let’s say a company boss says, “I don’t want any complaints from customers.” With that, you have to account for mind and heart to make decisions because the data might tell you that honoring a return causes you to lose money. Using your heart [leads to] top-notch customer loyalty even though it may cause a short-term loss such as a product return. In this instance, you use your heart coupled with your mind in the belief that loyalty will bring back that customer for years ahead. This is an example of why decisions cannot be based on data alone.

Customer satisfaction is just one of many guiding principles that run throughout an organization. The data might tell you that the product mentioned above is deficient, so work with your team to improve product development. You satisfy the customer in the short- and long-term and use the data to correct deficiencies moving forward. My point is that the data, along with mind and heart, is a much different mindset than just saying “let’s use the data.”  

What would you say to someone who says you always make decisions with your mind and not your heart as analytics data is objective and fact-based, while your heart can bring in subjective emotions?

I would say that this belief is just not true; it depends on what data we are talking about. Let’s say we have data and it tells us that we are 10% more profitable if we go in a certain direction. Now, as the CEO my next question is, what’s next? We have this knowledge, but does this also allow us to win more customers? Does this approach fit who we are as a company? This is all about your heart.

How will we support and service our new customers? How do we make our offering even more interesting that fits our strategy? This is about your mind. Part of your decision-making and evaluation is objective and data-driven, but what you do with that data is mind and heart. The data cannot tell you what to do, but it can help you decide. Business is based on people doing business with people. You’re not in the widget business, you’re in the people business. And when we involve people, that is where mind and heart come into play.   

With all the BI tools that we have at our disposal, is there a way to factor in one’s thoughts into any of the hosted software apps to recalculate what the analytics data is telling us?

To some extent, this is what some of the AI is trying to do. When you are writing algorithms for AI, you are trying to give direction so that it learns from the data. By giving it a very narrow direction, we can tell it what data to look at and tell it what we’re looking for so that it can find relevant patterns. Defining an algorithm in AI becomes very interesting as we refine it, and then we add in our mind and heart as we try to guide the algorithm for a specific output.

People try to use data for predictions, but the world is very complicated and complex. I can add data into a model for AI, but I cannot add mind and heart into the software. We can state that, “Yes, we are data-driven,” but we need to understand that we believe in X in everything that we do. If my data does not support what our mind and heart tell us, then sometimes we have to sit down with other people and say, “OK, here’s what the data tells us and here’s what we believe in. What do we think? Did we miss something in our analysis?”

Any advice on what a company should do to pull this process of data, mind and heart all together?

We must have common ground in the company on what to focus on and what to do. The data can help, but we have to have that overarching strategy, vision and guidance, and working with a group of people in the company can help us bring in our goals, objectives, collective minds and hearts into the conversation. The data can tell us what is broken and how to fix it. Let us not forget that transparency to relevant data is key. In the “old days” people used to sit around a table and argue about what is the real number. All these data points have to be factored in and need to be correct, but conversely, sometimes we need to take the data out of the equation.

Running a business is not like building a standardized product on an assembly line. It’s not something you can just put into a computer, take the output and run with it. If you just put data into a computer to tell us the type of company to build, well, all companies in a particular market segment would be exactly the same. Of course, this is not the case. … The savvy executive uses their mind and heart to help make these very important decisions that can help the company advance over the short- and long-term. We evaluate best case, most likely and worst-case decisions and take what we call a “calculated risk.” At the end of the day, it all comes down to data, mind and heart.

Heine Krog Iversen is the founder and CEO of TimeXtender. Since founding the company in 2006, he has been the chief executive responsible for transforming TimeXtender from a small startup to one of the fastest growing software companies in the world with 3,300 customers across 95 countries. Heine is driven by one core purpose: to empower every person in every organization with instant access to data, for any use case they might have.