Leading with Insight: Why People and Data Drive Every Decision (Sponsor Letter)

For a long time, I have been an advocate of the premise that the two things a leader needs to know more than anything else is their people and their data. Of course, this is hardly a paradigm shift, but it is no less important or difficult to learn. Knowing your people is the key to what’s possible, to knowing the primary points of excellence and differentiation an enterprise offers, to determining whether changes and transitions in the market and sector are opportunities or threats, and to building a culture that emboldens and empowers your people to take true ownership. Knowing your people requires listening, communicating, watching, and valuing your team, all of which takes time. Knowing your data reveals whether you are actually unleashing your team or whether you are just talking about it. As the sleuth of sleuths, Sherlock Holmes noted, “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, one may take the liberty to define Holmes use of capital as a noun, not just as an adjective.

This is all the truer of infrastructure and development issues where both people and data are paramount in decision-making. Before making an institutional decision to invest in plant, property, and equipment, remember that there is more than one kind of growth. Regular watchers of the tv show, The Bear recall business consultant Albert encouraging Ebraheim to “think small to get big,” advice predicated not on expanding the size of the current drive-through sandwich operation which served customers as they wanted and did so with an excellent margin, but to expand through adding additional, smaller operations in other locations. The advice took into account people-- customers were not seeking additional on-site amenities-- and data, the incredibly efficient and profitable drive-through window needed to be replicated, not operating in a bigger building with higher costs. People and data led to the recommendation.

In big or small picture conversations, the question remains what do my customers want and how can my people deliver it in a way that helps us achieve our mission? At Drury, we saw that the region needed a free-standing engineering program and we launched one, hiring great people who understand our institutional mission of personalized education and have tremendous expertise in electrical and mechanical engineering. And we’ve been apace at building the infrastructure to develop a program that grows great engineers who also have exposure to business courses and other ways to help them adapt to the world in which they will work. Now in year two of our program, we are off to a good start, building something that reflects people and data, in a way that is both excellent and different. We’ve taken similar approaches to building other new programs or expanding existing ones: mission, people, and data. Development then, is a mixture of old-fashioned people skills and modern analytics. When you do both of those, you have a better chance of success and honoring your mission.         

Jeff Frederick, Ph.D.
President, Drury University