I also thought this was a very important quote in today's world. Compare these two quotes: > The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with

I also thought this was a very important quote in today's world. Compare these two quotes: > The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes. vs. this famous quote from Jim Barksdale: > If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine. Now that everyone is praying at the altar of big data, I find it important to keep both these quotes in mind. In my mind, it's not that the data is wrong, but too often I've seen attempts to interpret data it ways that can undercut long term planning and vision. For example, Steve Jobs had a famous saying about why Apple never put a ton of "xyz inside" stickers on the bottom of their laptop keyboards. It would have been easy to look at the data and say "Company pays us X million dollar to add this sticker, but only 0.001% of people decide not to buy us because of the sticker, so we should add the sticker." Judging the long term damage to your brand because you cover up your machines with crap is harder to put numbers to.