Ch. 2 Summary: Think analytically: The power of facts.


From entry level to the most senior executive, today’s employees are being forced to make complex decisions and make them faster and far more often than their 20th century predecessors. Facts are the bricks of brainware which lay the path to such decision making. They are the basis for making sound judgments—about what process to change, what strategy to tweak, or even why a certain company product margin has gone south. Yet, many business people fear facts and hide from them, much in contrast to my Honeywell clients who readily quipped, “We trust in God. All others bring data.” This chapter explores the development of such fact-based analysis.

 

The most common failure in employee thinking and performance is caused by a confusion between inference or assumption and fact. Paul Markert, a medical products manager struggling to manage his promotion from “order taker” to strategic salesman, sabotages himself, initially, by his penchant for off-the-cuff sales information—sloppy thinking with inferences, deductions and assumptions piled high. He finds that a profitable relationship with two senior clients requires fact-based analysis of his clients’ needs over gut instinct. In this chapter, I emphasize how to distinguish clearly between fact and inference, and when facts need to replace gut instinct.

 

My process demonstrates the power that workers gain by seeking “the facts” in order to improve the quality of their decisions, validate their choices, diffuse the risk of the entire decision process, and transform disinformation into effective problem solving ventures. In this chapter I showcase the highly effective work process of Trudy Glines, a research scientist from a pharmaceutical company. I narrate her fact-oriented questioning of peers from marketing, manufacturing, and sales to gain the data--and personal support--she needs for the development of a new product research program.

 

I show readers how to achieve fact-based results by using language that can gain relevant facts, yet not cause tension or defensiveness. In this section, I present the case of Mark Kalish, a recent MBA hire, responsible for marketing a new health benefits program to his associates and peers at a major construction firm. The case exemplifies his linguistic blunders, but then reveals how he was able to reframe, restate and sell the health benefits program.


Not only is fact-based analysis the most valid form of decision making, but in actuality it’s also a superb form of impression management. Like it or not, the work world pays attention to those who talk facts. Many workers know how to manage the likeability factor, but fact-based conversations have the added benefit of supporting impressions of competency. Candidly, most people think about their reputation and impression, but dealing with it openly in this fashion significantly improves career potential. In several user-friendly anecdotes involving my clients’ questions of employee “capacity,” I depict the response of “capacity” questions to fact-based analysis and thinking.

 

The key issue remains, however, that when fact-based analysis and thinking are fundamental to decision interactions, employees will ask better questions, get more information, make change easier and adjust readily to new evidence—the very attributes executives recognize as high-powered business intelligence worthy of reward.

 

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