This is a tough one to write about. You spend a lifetime developing expertise, and then, along comes some whole new paradigm, and your expertise is genuinely, fully, antiquated. You don’t really know what you thought you knew.
This is my third lesson from the 2012 election debrief. I am staying away from the “politics,” but simply asking what are the business lesson takeaways from the 2012 election. Here’s the third in my series:
#3: Trust the new numbers geeks more than you trust the old “educated-hunch prognosticators.” The new numbers geeks understand what to target better than the old “educated hunch prognosticators.” And targeting, with precision, your current and potential “customers” is critical to your success.
It is now commonly understood that the numbers geeks on the Obama campaign (and the Nate Silver’s of the world among the “predicting folks”) had a much better, much more accurate handle on the election realities than the Romney backers and campaign team. The Romney people have admitted that “we underestimated their ground game.” But it is not just the ground game; it is the data behind the decisions made in the ground game.
And (I hate to write this – I am over 60 years old), I’m not sure many “old guys” can even understand just what the numbers geeks brought to the Obama campaign.
Let me try it this way;
Trust the numbers.
Trust the numbers to tell you if you have a shot at winning a certain state.
If the numbers tell you that you have a shot, then invest resources into the ground game in that state — but not until the numbers assure you that you are not “wasting resources.”
But, you’ve got to have the right numbers.
In the business world, this has all sorts of implications about identifying and targeting and obtaining customers for your product or service.
Here’s the account. Yes, this one comes from a political/partisan web site, but it is worth reading, regardless of how you feel about the outcome of the election: Peggy Noonan mocked data nerds who won the presidency.
Here’s what Peggy Noonan wrote back in July:
Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don’t care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat. No one was colder than FDR, deep down. But he loved the game and did a wonderful daily impersonation of jut-jawed joy. And people loved him.
The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn’t really very good at politics, and he isn’t good at politics because he doesn’t really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The “Analytics Department” is looking for “predictive Modeling/Data Mining” specialists to join the campaign’s “multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,” which will use “predictive modeling” to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. “We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.”
This wasn’t the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of ’92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?
And here’s is how the Los Angeles Times described the numbers geeks and their success — Obama campaign’s investment in data crunching paid off: No other presidential campaign has relied so heavily on the science of analytics, using information to predict voting patterns. Election day may have changed the game. This is the key excerpt:
Among its many decisions driven by data, the campaign chose to stick it out in Florida, even though polls and conventional wisdom raised doubts about Obama’s odds in the GOP-tilted battleground.
Just weeks before the election, the analytics team’s assessment suggested a 30% to 40% chance of winning the state, Wagner said. But after the team added information about roughly 250,000 new voter registrations, the projection shifted, showing that 80% of the new registrants would vote and they would heavily support Obama.
When the computers spat out this data, indicating that Obama was likely to win in Florida, a howl went up from the Cave. A mathematician from the University of Alabama started it off with the ‘Bama fighting words, “Roll Tide!”
So, the business lesson: learn to know which numbers to trust and rely on. Then act on those numbers. (Hint: it’s probably going to take a team of young geeks to come up with the numbers in this thousands-of-computations-at-a-time number-crunching-world of this new era).
Man, am I feeling old…
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