As a 23-year-old young adult with an undergrad business degree, I can confidently say the last five years of my life have mostly been spent sitting in flimsy plastic desks paying $70,000 a year to get peppered with thousands of management quotes from Silicon Valleys billionaires that I could have learned much more quickly by searching "inspirational corporate posters" on Etsy. That being said, every now and then I do come across a quote or phrase that has genuinely altered the way I look at my job or think about making decisions in business, and one of these comes from Jeff Bezos.
Speaking at a leadership forum in April 2018, Bezos was asked about the relationship between following data vs following anecdotes when making decisions at Amazon. I think most people including myself would have expected Bezos to harp on the importance of "following the data" because the "data doesn't lie" and "it's hard to overestimate the power of analytics."Mantras like these are becoming sexier and sexier by the year in tech as data analysts continue unlocking all the ways we can use massive data pools to unlock correlations and business insights that the human mind would never have been capable of seeing.
But Bezos didn't say this. He said, "...the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There is something wrong with the way that you are measuring [the data]."
This was a massive "Bingo" moment when I first heard it. It's something a lot of us intuitively understand; sometimes data tells us something is true that deep in our gut we just know is false. Many CEOs today in that scenario would probably say ignore your gut and follow the data. Bezos would say trust your gut and reexamine the data, and I think Bezos is 100% correct. It's important to "follow the data," but if you don't keep an ear to the ground too, you might just follow your data into a ditch. There's no way to know if your data is going the right direction unless you have anecdotes to verify it.
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