Machines will, in the future, replace some of most people’s working tasks, replacing repeatable, ordered tasks. But machines are weak at understanding people’s mood, and developing and building trusting relationships. So, you will need to build and leverage the soft skills of your people to give you a competitive edge. You need to build your value proposition on the human skills in your company to provide differentiation.
Read MoreNext time you negotiate with a strategic customer, ask them to include more data. To understand the value of data, imagine you are a director of a radiology company with millions of digital images. A company asks to buy 100,000 images plus your diagnosis of each image. This company will use these images to train Artificial Intelligence to analyse images automatically. How much will you sell them for?
Read MoreAs a lecturer in change management at AGSM, I talk with many professionals from different companies and industries. A few innovative companies are working on improving their customer experience and their employee experience. These innovative companies are introducing artificial intelligence (Ai) and increasing the skills of their people, particularly their social intelligence. These companies are making courageous decisions to invest in a time of uncertainty to create a competitive edge. In an increasingly challenging business environment, sitting back and waiting to see what the future will bring is a very dangerous strategy.
Read MoreYou have a mountain of data but how can you use it to persuade and provide you with a competitive edge?
Read MoreAnalysts feel pain while trying to convince senior audiences with data. There is a great article that states the solution when persuading executives with data is to frame your message using one or more of the following four topics:
It is not just the volume but the complexity of data being collected that makes it difficult for us to analyse and interpret in a clear and simple way. As we are bombarded with data, most people still reach for excel to create charts to explain this data. After all, it's easy. Select our table of data, find the command for insert chart, chose one of the types of chart and then choose one of the options for that specific chart. That's easily done.
But as Samuel Johnson may have written over 200 years ago: charts created without effort are read without insight.
So, with a little time and effort how can we create charts to be read with insight and pleasure?
Read MoreWith a tsunami of data it is easy to create large tables of data. However, with such large amounts of data, it is difficult to see what the message is. When presenting these tables, some people leave them in the default order. So, if it was a list of sales by country or sales by product then these would be listed alphabetically. Unfortunately, insights rarely occur alphabetically. So, if you sort alphabetically then you are burying your insights and making it hard for your audience to find the insights.
Find out how to make your insights clearer.
Read MoreOne of the world's experts on this topic is Gene Zelazny, Director of Visual Communications for McKinsey and Company. Just pause for a minute and consider that one of the world's top management consultancies pays someone to be the Director of Visual Communications. McKinsey specialised in fact-based analysis, so why pay attention to visual communication? Because, it takes more than logic to persuade an audience to act. The audience must understand, agree and remember. Visuals help people process the message faster and are more persuasive than words.
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