Going Deep and Living to Tell the Tale: Keys to Delivering Impactful End-to-End Stories to Executive Audiences

• Activity Number: 517
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Consulting
• Author(s): Paul Swiontkowski*
• Companies: Microsoft
• Keywords: Marketing Mix Modeling ; Decision Scientists ; Driving Transparency ; Decision Support Systems ; Communicating Results ; Story-telling

Abstract

Executives frequently ask Data Scientists (DS) to interpret and codify the relationships existing between business actions and their consequences to inform organizational decision-making. In response, DSs will then set up meetings to convey their perspectives to senior business managers who have little or no experience or comfort with the underlying mathematical principles that the DSs used to extract insights, draw inferences, and recommend courses of action. In the absence of historical experience, standard heuristics or other tried-and-true techniques that managers have at their disposal when making significant resource allocations, managers are put in the position where they must leverage the analytics provided by the DS as the basis for their multi-million dollar decisions. This ever more common organizational reality puts a premium on the DS's abilities to encapsulate brilliant analytical work in a cogent, complete and persuasive hour-long presentation. This session examines some key guidelines that the presenter found particularly impactful in framing his own data sciences-based executive discussions addressing marketing mix decision support efforts at Microsoft.