How Are You Making Your Business Decisions?
good evening everyone i want to thank everyone for coming tonight we're going to get started and um we thank you all for coming um i'd like to thank our sponsor who is the letty group who sponsors our business indicator series here on the seacoast and then we have bellwether community credit union who sponsors our manchester business indicator series they're sustaining members they've supported this program for nine years and we're so thankful to have them as a part of the community and helping us provide really quality programming for you all so thank you so much for coming i'd like to introduce tony sepulveda i'm sorry i practiced it too i know um um but tony has over 22 years of experience ranging from data analytics to operations management and currently works over in the shipyard and he is going to talk to us today about how you are making your business decisions so just a little bit of background in modern society where we're blasted and overwhelming with an overwhelming influx of information that can be paralyzing us from making decisions and taking action so how do we tame the flow and leverage this information to gain the upper hand in business we're going to talk with tony a little bit and he's going to share with us some of those insights please feel free we're going to have questions and and kind of a conversation afterwards as well so um tony has a presentation and then we can continue the conversation after so thank you so much for coming thank you aaron appreciate that yeah turn this on can you hear me yes can you turn it up it's all right i got a device we can get through this so again thank you so much for coming uh i know that there's two things here that we have that you'll never get back my words and your time so i know it's very valuable here so i don't want to waste any more of your precious time and give giving me this gift so i do appreciate you coming out so how we making our business decisions just like aaron has alluded to we are inundated with information on a daily moment-by-moment basis and there are times when we get uh paralysis by analysis right we just don't know what to do with certain things or where are we going with uh with our businesses or and you can even put this in your own life as well so there's a lot of good information here so summary i'm going to give you a little bit of background about me where i come from what i do what drives our decisions when does change take place what is an authentic leader what is data how can data analytics help and why is it important and then i'm going to put it all together in a summary there okay so the first thing about me is i grew up in washington state so i'm from the west coast right left side i spent 10 years in active submarine service so i'm working on the boats i used to go out on and things like that so currently work in the dod for 12 years and the other 10 was active duty military mba project management 2014 data analytics from snoo in 2016 and then starting up the business illuminated data solutions doing um business consulting for data analytics visualizations and and what have you so what drives our decisions and that you know you can ask questions or you know if i ask a question you know the answer just go ahead and pop that out to me uh you know kind of have a conversation as we go along kind of make things more smooth and things like that so what's driving our decisions you know one thing i was thinking about was when we came here uh you all decided to come to this event you knew it was me that was speaking you didn't know me from adam um but you knew what this topic was and you made choices to get here um so we have i'm sorry alcohol that's all the good stuff right so when i was thinking about it uh when we think about our decisions there's several things that we talk about business and we talk about our society uh there's a couple things here we look at it's our culture we make decisions based on our culture we make decision space with that with the technology with our employees with people that we work with that all these different decisions have to be adjudicated when we think about it whether it's a gender gap whether it's a generation gap you know we're talking about millennials or we're talking about generation x or the baby boomers or whatever you want to call it we have to make those decisions and then industry helps us make those decisions you know whether we're driven uh to compete with somebody who's got a better product or uh we are in the forefront and we just got to keep keep on that forefront and uh leading change so what is an authentic leader anybody can give me a brief definition of what an authentic leader is authentic anybody no okay so an authentic leader looks at three different areas i'm going to give you all three of them all at once the authentic leader deals with the organization has an overall understanding what the organizational goals are has an overall view of where things are going to be headed towards and has a good understanding of what is needed to get to that position the second thing that they have uh in mind are their employees all right we we have i'm sure we could go around the room and we could share different situations where we look at we've had a bad experience with a supervisor or a boss or ceo or somebody who's just not given us what we thought we should have as an employee and then we can go back and the same thing and say you know we have this awesome guy i used to work for he's no longer with the company anymore right it's usually usually the good ones move on right so and then that authentic has awareness of themself right self-awareness now when i talk about self-awareness i talk about not only their strengths and they don't use their strengths as a baseball bat they use their strengths as something to encourage the employees and motivate the group for the organization and they know their weaknesses i think a sign of one of the greatest signs of an authentic leader is humility and with that humility comes a servant leader i'm very much a proponent of servant leader some of the studies and some of the things that i've researched have shown that servant leader uh doesn't just think of themself but they put themselves in to the the life of their employee and and works for them right i me as a manager i don't want to put uh something in front of my employees that i wouldn't have done myself right i want to be able to look at their their performance and things as something that i would do my own right because when it comes boils down to is me as a manager i'm responsible for my area whether my employee does the work or not so if i'm encouraging them and showing them how to do the work then they're going to be able to produce what i need to get done for my manager so where does change take place again we mention i mentioned real briefly we all decided to come to this one spot and i think change takes two there's two avenues in which change can take place the first one is fostered change right this is an initiated change foster change it's done through innovation done through new knowledge done through a willingness to change and it's uh you see a need and you and you take the lead and you change what you have to do right it's just like if you are wherever you came from you drove here whichever was the fastest way you thought necessary you were going to take those round to get here and that those are foster changes when we better as we live our lives and go through our business to help foster change and one of the biggest things with that is innovation being able to think beyond where we're at and increase our capacity and learning and increasing our capacity to do more in less time the other thing that i i look at is forced change right so you have foster change somebody that is you work as a team or you work together and you and you bring about change um and then you have force change right and i know that there was quite some things that were going on out here and they force you to go one way or another and sometimes we don't like to be forced but when i look at force change we look at company setbacks a company has to do some uh reorganizations or whatever the case may be and it forces people to change whether it's changing a career uh change their mind on the direction they were going whatever the case may be but they're forced to do it and then management turnover right and when somebody takes over that new manager wants to make some changes so those employees either have to adapt and or they're gonna or they're gonna go somewhere else we're gonna do something else and then uh catastrophe and i'm afraid that a lot of times when we are fortunate changes because something bad happened i work over here at the shipyard and if you remember a fateful day in 1963 april 10th the thresher sank off the coast here it's very very much a monument here in the seacoast area about that day and i'm sure there's people that i've i've known that had known somebody on that or had a relative or things like that and that catastrophe though brought about some good change but it was forced that change was forced uh so when we fast forward you you think of the the the some of the accidents that you've seen in the news where these these submarines then have come back they've had a problem but because of what has happened before the navy was forced to change but yet then other lives were saved through that so when we have our changes right that's how we make make our make our determination where we're going so we need to look at our force changes not necessarily as a bad thing but sometimes it takes bad things to force us to do what we're supposed to be doing so where can data analytics health and this is where i think that a lot of changes can happen right so every single person if you were to step into a new job tomorrow so you got a new job and you're ready to go you step into that job with two things you step in your job with education and you step in that job with experience and nobody can take that away from you right that's empowering whether it's whether you're working in your field of education or not you still come in with some sort of education some sort of experience your life lessons things that you've learned nobody can take that away from you what i'm going to offer is a third blade to that stool and that's data analytics so what is data analytics basically it's a fancy term right it's a scientific message method for ledgering uh levering gene existing data to help with the current future decision making framework right and we can see here we can gain actionable insights we can see the past present and predict the future a third leg of decision making and then show us what uh what we're not seeing one of the greatest compliments i got in some of the work i do was when i presented my work to a supervisor they said you know what this really helped me because i didn't know what i wasn't doing so it was able to shed some light on some areas that we needed to show up and needed to get fixed so now we think about our decision making right we made a decision well if i know if i have a gps now to help me get to the fastest route i don't have to make those decisions i can rely on my gps now you know i don't want to i have a good sense of direction so even though the the gps will leave me somewhere i can make decisions as we go right now look at data analytics in such a matter where we can look at it as a gps now we want to be careful and i and i've ran into this on several occasions where people feel threatened by data by the answers in data by the actions by the the insights that come from data because they're like what do you need me for but we actually did because when i bring in data and i do have some insights and i get some actionable insights from it i need somebody who's knowledgeable and has the experience to execute me as a data guy i don't know how to execute i just showed you what was in the data the data has a story and i and i need to i want to bring that story out and it's up to you to to implement that story so as we think about decision making we think about how we're doing this you know what kind of effects does data have on our decisions right you you think about some of the statistics that come out and this that and the other thing and in the past have you made decisions based on these statistics um you know it's statistically you you know plane travel is still the safest way to go or whatever the case may be you may be making that up now but but as we think about we make decisions every single day based on what sometimes it's a gut feeling sometimes it's a uh an educated guess sometimes it's you know what i know that is a fact because i've done it before other times it's you know what this is what it's showing me now i can make those decisions so as we think about making our decisions the key word that i wanted to point out here is is this leveraging right i'm going to leverage the information i'm gathering to make a better decision later on you know and then we look at the future right we look at the past we have historical data we can go back a long time and pull that data together and look at where we were at to where we're at now to where we're going and give us some good decision making uh policies maybe even have to change the framework in which we make decisions whether it's here at snoo or in your place of business uh we make we have to be able to be agile enough to to change people uh i know that in my life uh sometimes i'm resistant to change right so with that change there's two types of people that come with change there's change agents those people that initiate the change and then there's change recipients those who receive the change so in that same relationship not only do we have a change agent and change recipient we also have a chain a leader and a follower right and i look at from the idea that the follower is just as important as the leader is because if a leader doesn't have any followers they're just out for a walk okay they don't have anything so if a leader needs a follower just like the follower needs the leader and we think about the idea of you know what i need somebody to show me how to do this we may not be in a leader leadership position but we need to be able to uh look at this team and work together you know i'm not in the mindset of you know a commanding control i'm more of hey let's see what what kind of thing can you bring to the table to help this team go forward and and foster that change right and i think through that we we get growth right not only do we grow together but we grow upward as well right we plan our routes in our education we plan our routes and our experience and then as we butt out as we produce the fruit right whatever we're doing is through that that fostering right so what are the effects of data analytics on decision making process what can it affect what can it do for you and then what can happen if you don't use data analytics right so if you think about it uh i don't know what i don't know until i know so it's kind of a weird funny way of saying it but as we think about it right our knowledge is only as much as we want to have right we've all been through school we understand the basics we understand some specifics but we don't know until we don't know and if i don't and then once i find out then that's where that decision-making process comes in is once i then figure it out what i haven't been doing and this is some of the research that i'm getting into is how does that affect what at what point in time do i decide that this change needs to happen or i need to make a decision here right you're driving down the street and you see a cop car what's what's the initial reaction right you take your foot out you could be going the speed limit you're still going to take your foot off off the gas it's just it's just the way it is right um same thing is true is if you see an accident or you see you see the blue lights on what are you going to see oh my goodness and i get pulled over or something right so you know certain indic and uh certain things happen initiators that come into our lives to help us right and i think data analytics can do that and then there are some risks risks of the unknown but there is a way to do risk uh mitigation right we all understand what mitigation is and taking you know is this enough do i have enough information to even though i don't know what's going to happen exactly but i know enough that i think that the risk is going to be worth its reward so then how does it all work i'm just going to give you all this right so the overview is we all have leaders we have decisions we have information now we need understanding we need change and then we need to take action right so if i know let's say i have the cure for cancer break my hand i have the cure but i'm standing right here as a problem right we need to take action we need to move forward as we look at we're trying to we start to get the knowledge we start to get the understanding we start to get these things and present it to the leaders and make decision makers then what are we doing with it what do we have where are we going how can we do different what can we do better right and we need to keep driving forward and as we said at the beginning sometimes we can get paralysis by analysis and just not real sure you know one of the knee-jerk reactions oh you did the you did your analysis wrong go redo it um so as we think about our decision making we think about it you know how can how can i get more information right so decision making right and that's all i have it's awesome i um i had something come across my linkedin um earlier in the week and that was the um the elon musk the his um email to his company and that it made me think of it because you're talking about servant leadership and also catastrophe so something really bad happened and one of the workers on the line got hurt and he put it out to the company where he was like if anyone gets hurt i want to know first and i'm going to go down and do the job that that person did getting hurt so that i can understand better like having that awareness of being able to um make better decisions and make changes happen um from the top down is really nice that's good any questions comments um gut reaction too i'm always skeptical of a gut reaction i think in its purest form don't you think it's sort of like your brain is a process or over the years you've collected all this data and you don't even remember it but something's triggering that forward i think that gut reaction goes back to uh the first two stools i mentioned the legs of the stool i mentioned whereas your experience and your education if i've already been here before you know what i kind of have an idea what's going to happen here right in some respects prior experience contextualizes the data you're looking at i believe so so one of the things that we look at is if you bring me a data set i don't know anything about it i don't know if there's anomalies i don't know if people can people who know the information can look just look at the data set and they haven't done anything with it said you know what there's some things wrong with it there's something not right you know like when you hear uh hear a symphony somebody who's really in tune with the music and somebody's off just a little bit you know what that person's off so when you when you gain that experience whatever information that you have with you you're able to look at it and say there's something wrong here right so me as a i'll say a data analyst right so if i look at data and i say somebody comes over here and says hey i need you to analyze this data and i can i can bring you an analysis but it's going to be up to that data owner or that data sme to be able to have those experiences or have those prior knowledge you know this just doesn't look right let's re-look at this again so running with that a little more maybe on the flip side would you think indecision or analysis paralysis comes from a lack of experience where you can contextualize i think that it could be absolutely but i also think that analysis by paralysis is you want to do too much with what you have you you have this data set you want all these answers and you can't you just doesn't work that way but i also believe what you're saying is true as well anybody else um i think in our company we have and i don't get me wrong but i think there's a lot of like sugar coating within the company so when we analyze things we're trying to get the positive data out of negative situation so we know our sales are down our customer counts are down we see all the data but we magically will come up oh but we're selling more of this that we didn't do last year or we're doing better this that's we didn't last year but it's not even relevant to the case because we stink at this point in time somehow and that's a lot of times i put in that position because it looks like i do okay with the numbers and i will be told okay you have room of 30 people you don't have to scare them away so you need to give them something good and going through data and find something good almost like impossible there's no good right and i think that's what it nice to have a third party involved when you're not relevant to the issue you just show it the way it is and you don't have to be concerned about personal feelings and who doesn't do the job the right way a lot of things that i've run into is just that issue is um i have a tag on my emails and data doesn't tell any lies it doesn't have any agendas it doesn't like anybody so if you think about it if you truly take the data for what it is it's going to give you the truth it's going to give you uh uh you know like you you go to the doctors and they say well you've got this this this and this you don't do anything about it you know we want to get fixed right we want to do better but we take it and look at data and we're like this analyst doesn't know what he's doing because this is this is all our company is all messed up right when in actuality that's just the barometer from the data that's coming out so yeah anybody else so just to follow on that how important do you think um visualization tools are maybe to to sort of not you know sort of anonymize that sort of kind of i think data visualization tools are key because i can look at um anybody can not anybody not anyone can look at a set of data and yep this is wrong when you start pulling visualizations and i had a i had an aha moment with a supervisor where we were presenting i was presenting some data and then i put the visualizations to it and made a dashboard and made it interactive where you can start looking at the different years and you can start looking at the different clients you can start looking at the different vendors and so on and so forth and he saw these things moving he was like oh my goodness i never saw that before you know there i think part of data analytics is the visualizations uh one of the things that i was i was in course development with snoo a new course that we developed with the mis degree is mis350 it was uh it's business intelligence and reporting and it's centered around microsoft power bi microsoft power bi is basically an extension of excel but it's a platform where you just produce visualizations you take the data that you have and it's all automated and you like if you have a map you can click on a state and then all the other map all the other graphs or charts you have will change based on what you've clicked on so i think visualizations are very important to the analysis part of it absolutely yes sir 20 questions so as an accountant i've always been by you know you manage the business by the members right and also early in my career i worked at a software company and their product was around business intelligence yeah and what their product was they would go into a company and they would say this data exists in 10 different places so which version of the truth is actually the truth so if you apply that what you're doing a company is really ready to leverage analytics because they're getting data but they may only have half the truth or three quarters how do they know which is really the right version of the truth right so when you think about the different avenues or the different areas that data can come in i think the very first step you have to do is normalize the data you have to come across so you i would pull in all of that data and if it's the same it's just coming from different sources i would validate i would take one and validate it and have that as my measuring tool for everything else so then i know that this one source is good and then i'm going to look at these other sources i may not even need those other sources because i'm using this one right so multiple sources is not good because then you run into that problem you're going to run into a problem where you know what i don't know what to do because this one says this and this one says this on the flip side of that is well maybe this is looking at the front side of the house and this one's looking the back side of the house and if you're able then to analyze that you're going to be able to see it maybe get a 3d view of what you're doing based on those different sources so it's just just that process of you know getting on the writing wheel and get through the analysis of it because the company i worked at one of what one of the reasons why they were able to be very successful was because they were able to show companies that you're trying to make decisions based on this data it isn't even the final data so this is kind of a similar tag alignment if you're truly doing this right and like i say normalize the data then you truly can manage the business by the numbers because you know it's right right not hoping it's right so the one thing that i push i push the hardest and i'm wondering quality is i told my boss when i first got the job i've only been there just over a year i said i'm going to run quality through data i said i'm going to be able to see these programs through the data i won't even have to mess with the program managers i'm going to give you the data i'm going to give you what it says right but the very first thing i pushed on was i want source i want the i want the parent source data because like you said i could we we have these pockets of data in our business that hey i've got it this is my information silo and nobody else can have it and then they leave now i have this what does this person use this data for right so what i do is i want to bust down those silos and get right to the source now if i have the source everybody can tie to the source whatever they're looking at for the data so thanks sir yes sir part of what i on the analytics i'm i'm a cfo and i actually work for a former cfo and our opinion on data is very very different and part of part of what you're talking about is actually having encouraged to tell what the data says right say that one more time courage to have to say what the data says right and so i i use like the cpa examples of it as an example if you get a 68 you fail you get a 74 you pass well if you get a 68 it's not like i failed but no you failed it to drive the energy to make it better to pass the next time so that's the part where where the in when you were saying you know what how do you spend that data people want to hear the positive they don't like to hear negative right and so i always say to be the negative person but i'm always the one that i believe that the honest truth about what the data's saying is going to drive a better result in trying to make a better position with what the data can be interpreted today absolutely so when we think about business right we think about the business that whatever we're in we boil it down to its finest part is we want to do good right i know it's not proper english forgive me but we want to do better we want to be on the forefront we want to we want to have our goods and services out there we want to make money we want to be able to take vacation so on and so forth but yet there are times where we're just like but i don't want to know the truth about it and i think that's the first step and i told i told my boss i said you're going to look at saying you're going to look at some of these things that come out he's been doing it for 30 years i've only been there for 13 months that i'm going to see that he's never seen not because i'm smart it's just because i see it in the data and i know what data does and he's going to have to make those decisions but you but you're right you're going to have to be able to say and this is what i've suggested i think you make a date of amnesty this date forward whatever happened in the past days in the past we just need to fix it we need to go forward and fix it and then as we go forward we're going to be able to see i don't want a 74 percent i want 100. i want a 99. so give a day of amnesty and say okay if you messed up before let's forget about it move on which got to be willing to change today that's the way i would approach that as well yeah good point anybody else that's it thank you hi so thank you all we still have some time but i did want to take just a moment and point out a few people in the audience we have three members of our board of directors here alumni board of directors so rich um dave and jeff are all here um please ask them questions if you have questions about alumni involvement or being on the board of directors we always really appreciate our alumni coming back and supporting our students as well as other alumni programs so please if you're interested in giving back in any way you can talk with amanda or myself or any of don or the board of directors and we'd be happy to reach out to you with more information either through our mock interviews or other on campus and at a distance opportunities so thank you so much for coming i hope you enjoy some food and a beverage and enjoy the networking as well thank you
2021-03-03 22:25
