Business in the 21st century is being redefined by a data-driven revolution. Take the MIT Media Lab’s experiment to see whether it could estimate retail sales performance on “Black Friday,” the day following the US Thanksgiving holiday. Instead of waiting for data from the stores themselves, they used location data from mobile phones to infer how many people were in the parking lots of major retailers. Combining this with data on average spend per shopper enabled them to estimate a retailer’s sales, even before the company had recorded it themselves.
Data Can Do for Change Management What It Did for Marketing
It’s time to make transformation empirical.
July 31, 2017
Neasden Control Centre for HBR
Summary.
One area so far relatively untouched by data is change management. That’s not because there isn’t a problem to solve. A survey of these different studies by Manchester Business School concluded that failure rates were consistently in the range of 60% to 90%. It’s time for that to change. The combination of predictive analytics, large data sets, and the processing power of today’s computers is starting to transform change management. Just as the discipline of marketing has transformed from soft to hard science in the past 20 years, so too will the practice of change. But before that can happen, we have to understand why data has failed to catch on in change management to date.
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Change may be the only constant in today's organizations. Here's how to lead through it.
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New!
HBR Learning
HBR Learning
Change Management Course
Accelerate your career with Harvard ManageMentor®. HBR Learning’s online leadership training helps you hone your skills with courses like Change Management. Earn badges to share on LinkedIn and your resume. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies.
Change may be the only constant in today's organizations. Here's how to lead through it.