When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style
(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.
This was initially inspired by an article posted to Hacker News, regarding Google’s mismanagement of its communication tools.
When I talk to the 20 tech people who I respect most, what I notice is that everyone respects Google less now than 5 years ago. Is it a successful branding strategy that generates so much dislike?
I’m especially curious because Google is famous for basing its decisions on “data”. I have no idea how things work in Google, but I can say that every company I’ve worked at that supposedly valued “data” in meetings actually valued something darker. The use of “data” in meetings tends to be a passive aggressive negotiating tactic for a group of people who for cultural or emotional reasons don’t think it is reasonable to express strong disagreement or actual anger. Instead of expressing strong emotion, people are taught to quote data — they then cherry pick whatever statistics back up their beliefs.
As far as I know, there has never been a company that said “We want the worst informed people to make the decisions” so in a sense all companies have always valued data. But they didn’t make a fetish out of it. They simply expected people to be well informed, and to make intelligent arguments, based on what they know. That would have been true at General Motors in 1950. That much has probably been true at most companies for centuries. When management says that the company is going to be “data driven” they are implicitly asking for a particular type of interaction to happen in meetings, an elaborate dance where people hide their emotions and quote statistics.
