正如设计界的思想家罗杰?马丁所言，领袖需要“兼听则明”。评价21世纪的商界领袖，不再看他/她能排除多少不确定性，而要看他/她能忍受多少不确定性。
大数据不敌直觉力。
数据也许能预测新问题，也许能找到已知问题的新解决办法，不过只有人类的直觉和巧妙心思才能提出开创性的新想法。这是独一无二的人类天赋——它远远超过解决一个问题，超过满足某个功能需求的层次。
同样的，如果我们量化所有的人际关系，就无法给人类的判断力留下任何回旋余地。因为我们常常把对人们的感觉和他们的行为混合在一起，我们的判断力比二进制数字更加复杂。它意味着我们可以对双重行为有着更细微的评估和反应，我们可以选择将失败视为创新的先决条件。很难想象，如果我们丧失原谅的能力，如何还能朝着任何目标前进。
让我们抵抗冲向数据的欲望，花时间沉住气，必要时再加快步伐。让我们允许自己不时从数据中解脱出来，去思考什么才是真正重要的东西。让我们用数据来讲述自己故事，但不要让数据成为我们唯一的故事。
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.”