Data-Driven Decision-Making

Great By Choice by Jim Collins is a terrific book. Wonderful, timely, and very readable and accessible!

It is also very entertaining for the numerous anecdotes in it.

The idea I find the most useful for me is being "empirical." By that, the author apparently means that your decision must have data to back it up, that you must have proof, reason other than and outside of your feelings, hunches, gut feels etc for any decision you make.

He points out that great leaders can afford to be bold and to take frightfully big risks because they base their decisions on their own personal observations, not on second-hand research or heresy etc. e.g. (My examples) Steve Jobs's decision to run their own Apple stores, and (again) his decisions to enter the lacklustre tablet market with iPad. If you want to be bold, daring, decisive (and at the same time, responsible and not suicidal,) you need solid proofs, concrete data, undeniable facts, repeatable experimental results etc.

Does it mean Data-Driven Decision-making?

The author doesn't say much about this. But I would like to point out that whatever data, whatever amount and type of data, in itself, won't give you a decision. Data in whatever form or amount will not decide for you. Given the same data, two different committees can reach two diametrically opposite decisions.

If certain data does give you a decision, then you are not making a decision, but following an order, a recommendation, or some other person's decision.