Book excerpt from Restoring the Soul of Business

This is an excerpt from the opening chapter of Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Rishad Tobaccowala (HarperCollins Leadership, 2020), which discusses how the key to successful transformation in any organization lies between human intuition and data-driven insights.

The wealth and success and the sweet siren call of optimizing data has led us to overlook the collateral damage of forgetting, or neglecting to consider, the human side of the equation.

The age of data

Organizations are drawn to data for many reasons, not the least of which is the emergence of incredibly sophisticated technologies that allow us to process and parse information with speed and insight. But here are more reasons why the spreadsheet is dominating the story:

  • Data is plentiful.
  • Data is not messy or nuanced like feelings.
  • Data feels certain, while hunches are uncertain.
  • Data is...

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