Clay Christensen tells a good joke about a tour of heaven. “How come there’s no data here?” the Harvard professor asks his celestial guide. “Because data lies,” comes the response. And that is why, Prof Christensen goes on, “whenever anyone says ‘Show me the data’, I just say ‘Go to hell’.”
The gag got a laugh at last week’s Drucker Forum in Vienna, where fans of the late Peter Drucker’s claim that management is a “liberal art” voiced fears about the way data are wielded to crush human insight and inventiveness.
But there are signs of a backlash against big data even where it has loomed largest. As chief executive of UK supermarket chain J Sainsbury until 2014, Justin King commanded a data set that showed, for instance, that purchases of diet products were the best indication that customers were planning to go on holiday — and that they might therefore be open to some deft direct marketing of suntan lotion.