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For the past 50 years, most business leaders in free market-based economies have been taught or trained in a core ideology; "that the purpose of business is to serve only the shareholder". The source was #MiltonFriedman . Whilst shareholder primacy is simple and allows businesses to optimise for one thing, which has an advantage in terms of decision making, it has also created significant damage. It does not stand up to modern critique and challenges such as ESG. Importantly there is an assumption that a shareholder group was a united and unified collective. There is an assumption: shareholders are united and unified The reality is that in a public or investor-led company, the shareholders are as diverse in terms of vision, rationale, purpose and expectation as any standard group of associated parties. Shareholders as a group rarely have an entirely homogeneous objective. Given the dominance of shareholder primacy, how do we know this concept of non-homogeneous actors is genu...

What are we asking the questions for? This link gives you access to all the articles and archives for </Hello CDO> This article unpacks questions and framing as I tend to focus on the conflicts, tensions, and compromises that face any CDO in the first 100 days — ranging from the effects of a poor job description to how a company’s culture means that data-led decisions are not decisions. I love this TED talk from Dana Kanze at LSE.  Dana’s talk builds on the research of Tory Higgins who is credited with creating the social theory “ Regulatory Focus ”  This is a good summary if you have not run into it before. Essentially the idea behind “Regulatory Focus” is to explore motivations and routes to getting the outcome you want. The context in this article is to explore how a framed approach to questions creates biased outcomes. One framing in Regulatory Focus centres on a “Promotion Focus” which looks for “ gain ” which can be translated as finding or seeking hope, adva...

Can we live at the peak paradox? Peak Paradox is the middlemost point of the model. It is the point where everything has equal weight in terms of policy, priority, resources, commitment, interest, data and consequences.  It is the area of a perfect storm.  It is a magical (or imaginary) place where you can have everything, everyone else can have everything, no one is fighting for survival, and every work situation thrives.  In reality, the converse is probably also true. It is where everyone fights for survival; I cannot get what I want, others have nothing and work is just meaningless. It is in between these two states of euphoria and despair that we spend our time.  Never reaching utopia but somehow constantly individual’s individual’s feeling one step closer to dystopia.  In this state, we have to decide how to allocate the limited resources we have to be able to change the situation (for the better.)   Whilst hard to accept, we actually don’t hav...

The purpose of this post is to plot where some ( there is way too many to do them all ) different investment measures align on the Peak Paradox model. It is not to explain in detail what all the measures means and their corresponding strength and weaknesses.  This is a good article if you want the latter for the pure financial ones. Key ROI , Return on Investment. IRR Internal Rate of Return.  RI Residual income. ROE Return on Equity. ROA Return on assets. ROCE  Return on Capital Employed.  ROT Return on Time. IR Impact return.  SV  Social Value.  AR Asset Returns. PER Portfolio Expected Return. SROI Social return on investment.  The observation is that we have not developed with any level of sophistication the same ability to measure or report on anything outside of finance, which we call “hard.”   By calling other important aspects of a decision “soft” we have framed them as less important and harder to agree on. 

This link gives you access to all the articles and archives for </Hello CDO> “Prevention or Correction” is something society has wrestled with for a very long time. This article focuses on why our experience of “prevention or correction” ideas frames the CDO’s responsibilities and explores a linkage to a company’s approach to data. Almost irrespective of where you reside, we live with police, penal, and political systems that cannot fully agree on preventing or correcting. It is not that we disagree with the “why”; is it the “how” that divides us! I am a child of an age when lefthandedness was still seen as something to correct, so we have made some progress. A fundamental issue is that prevention is the best thinking; but if you prevent it, it does not occur. We are then left with the dilemma, “did you prevent it, or was it not going to occur anyway?” The finance team now ask, “Have we wasted resources on something that would not have happened?” When something we don’t lik...

Many ask the question “can AI be ethical?” which then becomes a statement “ AI must be ethical! ” In reality we do not tend to unpack this because it appears so logical, but maybe it is not as obvious as we would like. In May 2021 I wrote this article “ What occurs when physical beings transition to information beings? ”  It started to question what happens when an AI does not have the same incentives and bias as humans.  It was building on this the idea that an # AI should not make complex decisions about wicked problems that involve compromise.   There is an implicit assumption in the question “Can AI be ethical?,” that AI is either fundermentall not ethical or is already amoral today but #AI must somehow become ethical and have morals. (or worst it must adopt ours.)   I am not sure AI cares if it is ethical or not but that is a different piece of thinking which I explored here “ Can AI be curious? ”.  We know carbon forms can be curious but we worry ab...

Click here to access all the articles and archive for </Hello CDO> Day zero, you have arrived and you have 100 days to plan. ( H 0 ) How do you determine if your new company is addressing the underlying issues that hold back data from being what they imagine it can be?  The issues that hold back an organisation from really capturing the value of data are at a  minimum: org structures, people issues, a lack of accountability, and incentives. Whilst having a CDO, doing data science, having analytics, using artificial intelligence, testing data quality, and a world class data governance structure make a difference; true transformation will remain a struggle if the structural issues remain. The question is how do we, as a CDO, test the fitness of our organisation's preparedness for data.  If the results are acceptable to the leadership team is one of politics and is way beyond  the scope of this article.   To test the fitness of your organisation's prep...