Mobius GearsWe live in an incredible age of technology. IBM reported 2.5 billion gigabytes (or 2.5 exabytes) of data being generated per day back in 2012. That number is estimated to be have almost doubled today.

No doubt that is a lot of information, the large majority of it being unstructured information.

As a species, we have exceeded our capacity to manage the volume of data being generated. I don’t know if we ever could manage the volume of data.

The problem occurs when…

…Big Data meets Big Management.

When big data meets big management, big management feels like they have to do something with it. And they do. They manage the numbers or manage the information in a way that they can understand.

One company I worked with had a sales goal of a 40% increase every year. The owner had read somewhere that most people fail to set goals high enough. This he could understand, hence the unrealistic sales goal.

Unrealistic Sales Goal?

Yes, the sales goal was unrealistic. If the sales team could deliver a 40% increase in volume, the factories could not produce it, could not ship it, and highly doubtful they could even enter the orders.

This was the least of their worries. The reality was that, yes, most of us set goals for ourselves that are too low. If you set a goal for me that I personally feel is unreasonable and unrealistic, I will underperform in the achievement of that goal.

In fact, I would perform better with no goal than with an unrealistically high goal.

Go figure!

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