👤 Manoj Agarwal
10th January 2022
I met a co-founder the other day on Skype (yes, that’s the neighborhood cafe these days) and casually asked how life was treating her. As expected, she started ranting about how things are down, how 2020 turned out to be the exact opposite of what she had planned when the clock struck 12 at last New Year’s bash, and how it’s so unfair.
Almost reflexively (after all, this is becoming a familiar format by now), I took a deep breath, turned on my agony uncle avatar, and launched into my spiel on how the coronavirus has indeed been a wrecking ball from hell when the lady turned sharply, rolled her eyes and said, “Who said anything about coronavirus? I’m talking about [MIS reports](https://study.com/academy/lesson/mis-reports-types-meaning-example.html#:~:text=What is an MIS Report%3F,-Pretend you are&text=MIS stands for management information,make decisions%2C and track progress.)!” I was taken aback by the unexpected protagonist of her story till she resumed to clarify, “Winding, fuzzy, off-the-point and sometimes just plain untrue. Is it just me, or has the quality of Pitch decks, Daily Reports, and business updates hit an all-time low? That’s the real wrecking ball Manoj!”
It’s not just her, of course. We’ve all felt it at various points of our careers.
Executive summaries, Excel sheets, Business insight, Business news 2020, and updates that are more data dumps than the torch-in-the-tunnel they are meant to be are getting to be the norm rather than the exception.
This is both sad and worry-some. In these times of data overload that we live in, there’s a need – more than ever – for both clarity and brevity. Every decision in business – be it at the planning, talent, operations, marketing, or sales level – is (or should be) data-driven. In the knowledge age, information that is diffused, hidden, or delayed is information that is denied. And the consequences can be fatal – resulting in leadership blind spots and flawed decisions that can even sink the ship.
Given the uncertainties and ambiguities of the current time - not to mention competition - margins of error are narrower than ever. All of which makes this the perfect time for a quick 101 on the ‘spirit of reportage’. Mind you, both letter and spirit (intent) are important here. You may have ticked all the KPI boxes (the ‘letter’ part), but if you have either not understood the intent behind the exercise or honored its true spirit in your communication, the goal will remain unmet.
Given that smart and agile decisions is the dietary advice experts recommend for fiscal fitness in business, it sounded like a good idea to categorize the list of snafus and pitfalls under food names.
Here we go then:
This is a ‘format’ where no matter what you order, you end up getting a platter full of sliced, diced, and minced nuggets of data that, at first glance, seems to have everything that was on offer at the Sunday farmer’s market. This reminds me of an SEO project on social listening that I was leading recently. The report I got was choc-a-bloc with all the various kinds of posts we had published on our social media handles during the timeline in question, neatly stacked one after the other in an endless PPT slideshow.
It had all the ‘hygiene elements’ in place - date and time of posting, names of people who had LIKED and SHARED, and the geographies they were from. And yet somehow, the more I bit into it, the more the blandness of the salad hit me in the gut. For a social listening exercise, all I was getting was pin-drop silence. The problem? The executive in charge had shared a lot of action and plenty of data, but none of this was Actionable Data. He had shared information, not insight. That’s where the problem of lack of insightful reports comes.
For example, the report dwelled on a post that hadn’t performed well, but the deck stopped dead after that: It didn’t take that all-important next step that would explain exactly why it didn’t work, which also meant that there was no way we could correct the course. I also discovered this post that didn’t get any direct mention or interaction in the comment box. Still, I had got people talking about it in other social media groups and pages.
Since they were positive conversations, here was a definite ‘moment of triumph’ for our strategy team. The business report insight, however, completely missed the win because its vision was blinkered – focusing only on the posts it was asked to examine in the job brief, without looking up, left or right. We also had this campaign where we apparently got a good deal of ‘fan attention’, but later when I scratched deeper, I realized that the ‘share of voice’ (percentage of a brand’s engagement as a ratio of the engagement of the overall market pie or that of its competitors) was low – significantly bringing down the value. That’s not all.
The other occasion when I had to tuck into a smorgasbord (the traditional Scandinavian buffet) was the day a stack of resumes landed on my desk from the recruitment department. Here was a story without a plot. How did our top and bottom-funnel look like (and what was the ratio?) Did we get sufficient resumes for each position to justify the hiring strategy and media outlay cost? What was the conversion?
All Russian Salads have one thing in common: They are an end-in-themselves. Once you consumed it, the experience was over. It didn’t take the journey forward. Back to square one.
This is scary. Imagine asking for a regular burger at McDee’s and getting a giant Burger King Whopper that’s been super-sized with a vengeance. Maybe because someone somewhere believes that size is the solution to all life’s problems.
