I once worked for a boss from another country who was a dedicated, intelligent and thoughtful person who taught me a great deal about showing initiative and driving for achievement. Despite English being her second language, she was articulate and well-spoken, with one notable exception—clichés. She would misuse, misinterpret and combine clichés in alarming, nonsensical ways.
A sampling:
• (in moments of frustration) “go drive yourself off a cliff in your mother-in-law’s car”
• (on achieving results) “we must move the ball right off the field”
• (when questioning others) “if you believe Joe’s words, we’ll all be President of the United States”
While funny to recall, her clichés illuminate a flaw in how businesses often approach finding solutions to business problems. In a business setting, she couldn’t find the words to tell us exactly what she was thinking, so she fell back on ideas she thought we would understand. It didn’t work, although it was always entertaining.
As mangled as her clichés were, they are no worse than what business analysts all over the world are trying to pass for insights or true business intelligence. When people lack genuine insights into what is happening in their business, they will fall back on the shell of actual insight. It may be by using clichés in lieu of recommendations (“we think outside the box!”), the meaningless self-evident bullet point (“as the chart shows, sales are up!”), or what can kindly be called the non-committal stretch of reason (“if trends like these continue, you can expect great things in the future!”). These don’t work any better than misused clichés, and they are far less entertaining.
At MarketStar, we have found an effective way to differentiate between clichés and insights, through two simple words—“So what?”
Try it sometime. When reading a report, article or reviewing a presentation, ask yourself if you can see the proverbial “So What?” Does it deliver any value or insight? Does the data improve your business or its processes? Are you a more prepared manager for having read the report?
We use this methodology in all aspects of our business intelligence function. Whether we are analyzing feedback from our 800+ retail Brand Advocates who conduct hundreds of thousands of store visits every year to help our clients make better product and marketing decisions; analyzing sales data from our base of 200,000+ managed partners to determine how to accelerate sales more effectively for our clients; or conducting market research studies to find trends and interesting findings across all markets.
Our expectation at MarketStar is that our Business Intelligence solutions will provide real answers to real business problems which are additive to the process of succeeding in the marketplace. Our goal is for our clients to never read a report from MarketStar that doesn’t contain facts, recommendations, insights and a strong dose of So What.
In short, we’ll do more than just “think outside the box.”
In the comments, we would love to hear your favorite self-evident bullet points, non-committal stretches of reason and of course, the best (or worst) use of clichés!
