Personally, I prefer to have full visibility into my endeavors rather than marching blindly through life. Learning facts or information that you don’t want to know may not always be pleasant, but at least it gives you the opportunity to get ahead of the problem and address it head on before it becomes a crisis.
In our daily lives, we cannot always do this without help. In most jobs, there are mountains of data that not only need to be collected, but also processed. We often rely on software to collect this data, but that alone is sometimes not enough. In order to see the anomalies and abnormalities within the data, it is important that the software is smart and that it has logic and best practices built into it to provide the clarity we need. There has been a lot written recently about making sense of data and how to process it and I encourage you to take full advantage of those resources. For example, a recent Whitepaper on managing energy data overload : Demystifying Energy Data Management.
Sometimes, the logic and best practices we need are not readily available to us through the software we use and the vendors we work with. I encourage you to reach out to your software providers and help them understand what is important to you. What are the critical nuggets of information that you need to better run your business? Your software provider may need help learning from you what is important, and in turn, they can help you by building tools to help you get that information. Quid pro Quo.
As thanksgiving approaches, I plan to take this approach of needing full visibility and transparency all the way down to the plate of food that I will be eating. To accomplish this, I will be slaughtering my own turkey this year. I figure that if I cannot stomach chopping a turkeys head off and gutting it, how can I fully understand what it takes to put that scrumptious bird on my plate this November 25th. As I mentioned before, full disclosure is not always pretty… real, yes, but not pretty.
I do not expect, however, that the turkey will elect for visibility. In all likelihood, I expect my turkey to be drunk:
Martha Stewart Gets Turkey Drunk
So, where does that leave you? Are you a man…or a turkey?
