Main Idea
Have you ever played Monopoly? Have you ever spent your last $400 on a property and then on the next turn another player puts up hotels in an area that you are going to go through? Would you have wiped out your cash if you knew that they were going to do that?
Expansion of Idea
Information is power. Making informed decisions is the key to helping our businesses move forward. We can never know the future. But we can try to know the facts as they exist now. The main question to consider is how are you making decisions? What information is being used by you in adjusting your pricing, evaluating employees, or deciding on business strategy? How accurate is it? Is it the best source for making the decisions?
More information will continue to come out about the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. But already we have seen some investors who chose not to invest with him and others who chose to put their life savings with him. What is the difference between the two? There are sophisticated investors who didn’t invest and sophisticated investors who did. The key difference between the two is probably the extra question or extra step in evaluating the information. The investors who did not invest probably learned enough to realize that there were no controls on Madoff. They decided that if they could not be sure of the information, they did not want to make the investment. That saved them a lot of time, money and aggravation.
The current business environment requires that we reevaluate how we make our decisions and also what information is being used. It is critical that we go back to basics and look at the information to make sure it is accurate, appropriate and timely.
Areas to Start:
Make a list of your key pieces of information.
Test it and make sure it is accurate
Brainstorm with your team to see if it is measuring what you need.