For a funny and motivational piece about failure, go to 17 minutes and watch the last 90 seconds. The rest of the speech is also quite funny, but who has 20 minutes to watch it?? 🙂
Twin it with this podcast from Adam Grant where he argues against a strengths based approach (and kinda fails). The quote that resonated most with me (not from Adam but from one of his guests) is:
You can’t remediate your way to success
meaning if you only address your weaknesses you end up being mediocre. It reminds me of this 1940s fable about the animal school. Every animal had to learn to do everything, so the squirrel flunked swimming and the beaver flunked climbing and no one succeeded, but lots of young animals were wounded.
When you build analytics capability you can’t make your squirrels be good at swimming. But you can make sure they float if they fall in the water.
Building analytics capability starts with recruitment and continues through the career of every good data person. To find out what makes a good data person, try tuning in to my podcast.
What are your strengths and how are you building them? What about your team’s strengths, both as a group and as individuals? Are you putting a sundial in the shade and then wondering why it’s not telling the time correctly?
