In televised poker, there’s a bad moment after a player gets knocked out. The losing player gets up and shakes hands with whoever just took all their chips. They walk away from the table, and a TV guy puts a microphone in their face. The TV guy asks, "What went wrong?" The player is asking himself the same question. But he might not know the answer. Poker is a game of both skill and luck. For the skill part, your decisions are based on data in three main categories: 1. The ca

When the future is like the past, you don’t need new data. You can make a good decision based on old data. You can take the right action based on old data. When the future is like the past, taking the right action means doing what worked before. When I work with executives in stable industries, they don’t need new data. They know what worked before. Their job is to monitor the machine that is their company, so it keeps working. Quality assurance and Six Sigma techniques are t