What do leadership and math have in common? Well, for a corporate leader to know math must be something out of the ordinary, but the days when corporations will demand their leaders be proficient in math are already here.
The way we humans have been generating data has made this a hard fact. According to IBM, we now generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. If this weren’t phenomenal, many companies have revealed that their sales and marketing functions have been fundamentally transformed by analytics and Big Data.
Big Data is here to stay. So, companies are effectively asking their leadership to equip themselves with math skills. Companies the world over are launching Big Data initiatives and advanced analytics to improve their decision-making skills. Many researchers have rightly pointed out that Big Data will grow by around 10% a year for the next 10 years.
Several decision-makers and corporate leaders are discovering their documents and charts are now full of data compared to what existed 10 or even 20 years ago. But are today’s corporate decision-makers better equipped to handle data-driven decisions in a Big Data rule environment?
The ruling is clear – corporations around the world are making it clear that decision-makers across the board will need to equip themselves with math skills. However, such skills are lacking.
There’s much hullabaloo about data-driven decision making, but will corporate executives today be able to handle it?
Consequently, a clear picture is emerging that corporate executives and decision-makers will be required to brush up their math skills to augment them in their business. However, as of today, such skills are largely missing in the workplace. Consequently, terminologies such as regression and predictive accuracy are being discussed randomly; however, very few in the corporate workplace seem to understand these.
According to researchers in the UK, numerical skills are highly welcome in the workplace but the numeracy found in the workforce is nowhere near the desired levels. Even the US ranks 24th out of 30 in adult numeracy, but the skills required in a typical data-driven US corporation are much higher.
Therefore, a recent study by Harvard University rightly points out that math will be one of those skills that will greatly be in demand in the workplace. Thus, math skills like hypothesis-testing, causation, and correlation will be the basic requirements in a data-driven workplace.
Current trends indicate that math is becoming a critical skill that needs to be acquired in the workplace. If you work in a data-driven environment but you find yourself lacking in these skills, then the situation becomes even more challenging.
So, whether you like it or not, you will need to pull out that old high school math book from the shelf and start learning the basics again!
