Field Notes

Week after week, we sat in those meetings.
The idea was simple: create a council of unofficial data leaders, backed by a board of their superiors who could validate the big decisions.

In practice, it...

Last weekend I was trudging through the fields with my kids, trying to follow a dotted line on Google Maps. We go on bike rides and walks through the fields and forests behind our house all the time.....

The average tenure of a data leader is just 2.5 years.

Not because they’re fickle or unskilled... but because the playing field is stacked against them.

Most don’t fail on technology or tools. They ...

“My point is I’m pursuing something and nobody looks too happy about it.” – Rocky Balboa

When I first heard Rocky say that line, it struck me:

Rocky never doubted the direction of the path.
Only whe...

A client asked me to work on a dashboard with them a while back:

"How do we get all the data in there in real-time?"
"How many KPIs do we need?"

...all solid questions but off the mark. Let’s think ...

“Rob, you’re being intellectually dishonest.”

That response caught me off guard in a board meeting I thought I’d just nailed.

“You never give me a real choice in your presentations,” the senior exec...

Data was in the middle of my flywheel. Right there in my face... but I didn’t register it.”

A seasoned CIO told me this — mid-conversation — while pulling up a slide of the flywheel he'd been present...