Why You Need to Data the Sh*t out of Your Business in a Downturn

[jrineakter]

In the now iconic line of the 2015 movie The Martian, marooned astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) gave us a new verb to sum up his only possible exit from his Red Planet dilemma: “I’m going to have to science the sh*t out of this.”

For many businesses, our own version of a Martian dust storm has already been likened to an economic hurricane by no less than JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. So amid these howling headwinds of inflation, the likes of which we’ve not seen in decades, I’ll create my own new verb as well – every business leader should be ready to roll up their sleeves and data the sh*t out of their entire operation.

To bring the metaphor home, just as Watney had to locate, tally, and optimize every gram of protein, every molecule of oxygen, and the energy from every available isotope, companies must now not just collect but analyze to the Nth decimal point the complex relational web of data that defines the 21st century business – with 21st century tools.

Now of course, as the CEO of a leading data catalog company that creates the tools I’m talking about, I’ve got a proverbial dog in the fight. Fair enough, bias disclosed. But I also have some exposure to turbulent economic times, having founded and led two companies, Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice, through the dot-com bust cambodia whatsapp number data of 2000 (followed by the horror of 9/11) and the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. If anything led to my motivation to co-found my sixth company in 2016, data.world, it was the imperative of data mastery – the biggest lesson after surviving those two economic traumas. Now my team and I are at the frontier of the unfolding, data-driven economy. So the case that the coming economic challenges will be the first we can meet with a seriously augmented playbook, one that scarcely existed a decade or so ago, is a proposition I do not make lightly.

Data Runs in My Blood
Data and mathematics runs in my blood, with my grandfather having worked his entire career at the University of Texas at Austin as an advanced mathematics professor. He would always grill me on math way above my grade level, and I realized later on in life that he was doing me a big favor. I grew up really monitoring analog data in my parent’s stores. Ground truth was essential, and we would constantly ask customers how they found us and whether they were finding what they were there to shop for. When I attended The Wharton School to earn my MBA, I chose Sam Walton as the leadership icon I would study in my leadership class. I read his book Sam Walton: Made in America, which was all about seeking ground truth in his retail stores. He wrote the book to inspire his children and teach them how important it was to stay humble and be very customer focused.