A quality article from Booz and Co about forecasting.

Peter Drucker once commented that “trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.” Though we agree with Drucker that forecasting is hard, managers are constantly asked to predict the future — be it to project future product sales, anticipate company profits, or plan for investment returns. Good forecasts hold the key to good plans. Simply complaining about the difficulty does not help.

Steve Player of Beyond Budgeting fame recently blogged about moving from forecasting to adapting. Idea being, rather than focusing solely on increasing forecast accuracy (and building ever more complex — and fragile! — models), why not get better at adapting to evolving circumstances? I really like this notion. It fits nicely with the tenets of [...]

Last October, we partnered with Susan Scrupski, founder of the Adoption Council, to launch the Adoption Index Prediction Market, a space for the E2.0 community to forecast key industry trends. The current leader in the market is Samuel Driessen, an Information Architect at Océ, a 22,000-employee provider of digital document management technology and services. In [...]

Dr. Ajit Kambil, Global Research Director of Deloitte, authored an interesting piece on the use of prediction markets by CFOs. He presents a nice summary of how prediction markets work and their benefits — that they are a great way to aggregate dispersed insights and capture information that changes over time. Some implementations of prediction [...]

Watch Andy McAfee, one of the most influential management science thinkers, weigh in on the importance and value of collective intelligence in the enterprise.

I wrote about our own experience with Crowdcast here and here. My main thesis was that, in order to be viable, collective intelligence tools must support decision makers first and foremost. After all, it’s their challenges we’re striving to address. This realization was the impetus behind our Executive Dashboard, which I describe here and also [...]

In the New York Times’ weekly Corner Office column, the January 16th interviewee was Cristobal Conde of Fortune 500 company, SunGard. He spoke to the collaborative management methodologies that had been instilled at his company and how they altered their day-to-day workflow. Among other tactics, Conde mentions cutting back on micromanaging and using Yammer, a [...]