Mark Suster, Venture Capitalist, is famous for saying: “a startup should be hunch driven initially, and increasingly data driven over time.” This may be true for startups, but this topic deserves a more thorough discussion because it is relevant to how we approach the world.
In education, the hunger for data has created an unfortunate environment where teachers are teaching for the test rather than fostering creative thinking or really connecting to subject matter. Claire Hollander just posted an excellent article in the NY Times this Sunday titled “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart.” The whole article is her lament as a teacher of humanities getting crowded out by test preparation. In spite of her students developing a love for reading and having emotional reactions to classic literature, she states:
“And yet I do not know how to measure those results. As student test scores have become the dominant means of evaluating schools, I have been asked to calculate my reading enrichment program’s impact on those scores … I MAY not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students’ test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores.”
It always pains me when the Arts and Humanities have to be defended. And I get particularly annoyed when data is used to trump common sense. We need to find ways to reserve data for disciplines which are more mechanical, and then find other forms of evaluation for other fields.
In Business, “data people” often do not appreciate qualitative situations nor how vision works. When proposing tactical decisions, investors and partners want to see data. And this is very prudent when you have an established set of conditions to draw data from. However, leadership is often about creating an entirely new set of conditions in the future, for which there is no data.
A CEO does not really make their money on a daily basis. Rather, there are a few inflection points in a company’s history when profound decisions get made. Those decisions affect the life of the company and that is where CEOs earn their money. So the question becomes, how is that CEO living in between those decisions? Are they doing the things that will help them be well prepared when those moments come?
Vision comes (in part) from having wide exposure to disparate things, being able to make meaningful connections between those things, and pull those insights together into something practical. It requires being emotionally connected to world, having good taste, and being able to act intuitively in an informed way. This is what the Arts and Humanities teaches.
We need to be careful about demanding data at the wrong times and from the wrong things.
Monday, May 14, 2012 at 1:19PM