C-suite Future Diaries About Analytics

Let’s conjecture what executive C-suite officers might write in their future diaries. My crystal ball is crystal clear. From the year 2027, with perfect hindsight, here are the personal diary entries from the executives of a fictitious corporation reflecting on their experience implementing business analytics and the analytics-based performance management framework. The last diary entry written by the CEO was most surprising.

Vice-President, Sales

Dear Diary of Sales Commissions,

Recalling 2025, I did not believe our CFO’s claim that some of our long-term customers were very unprofitable to us. But then I saw the facts in her customer profitability reports. I also could not believe that our customer with the highest sales volume was much less profitable than our midsize customers. But then she proved that all the extra work we work did for that No. 1 customer substantially dragged down our profit. When the CEO and CFO ganged up on me to change our sales force’s commissions and bonuses to also include targets for customer profits, I thought they had flipped out. Everyone knew the name of the game was sales growth. Now I realize the goal is growing sales profitably – smart growth. You live and learn.

Vice-President, Operations

Dear Diary of Chaos,

I remember back in 2025 when my solution to wrestling with our volatile and dysfunctional operations was to standardize our processes to reduce our costs. But as the years progressed, I realized that our marketing research and engineering product and services development was increasingly tailoring differentiated products and services to each customer segment – and they kept micro-segmenting our customer base and future sales prospects! The continuing customized services became a huge tsunami wave that standardization of processes could not overcome. Now I am thankful we shifted our efforts to attaining much higher forecasting accuracy. The better our forecasts, the less uncertainty we have experienced – and the better our scheduling and capacity planning. What was I thinking back then?

Vice-President, Marketing

Dear Diary of Spray-and-Pray Advertising,

My MBA marketing courses taught me the current fads of the time: Put your budget money in branding, take your big customers golfing, and use gimmicks to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. But fortunately, I then discovered the secret to maximizing the yield from my budget money was through understanding the unique preferences of our individual customers and targeting new customers with traits similar to our most economically valuable customers. My big “ah-ha” was when I saw how powerful analytics of all flavors – statistics, segmentation, forecasts – provide us answers. At first I feared that the cost and effort to collect, understand and apply all the necessary data would be galactic and that I would have to replace my street-smart marketing staff with PhD geeks. But then I saw my team gain competency with precision targeting of their marketing campaigns and optimizing deals, offers and service levels based on the new intelligence we gained about our customers and their desires.

Vice-President, Human Resources

Dear Diary of Employee Turnover,

My staff and I reminisced today about how proficient we were back in 2025 processing paperwork for exiting employees and stacking inbound resumes in piles. I am so glad those days are over. The big breakthrough in our mindset was when we seriously applied workforce analytics to retain employees by predicting which were most likely to next quit so we could optionally intervene to prevent them from resigning – also to hire new employees that would truly fit our current and future needs as well as our culture. Now my challenge is growing our employees’ brains to accelerate their pace to innovate.

Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Dear Diary of Jail Prevention and Bean-Counting,

When we built our second cafeteria in 2025 just for the on-site external auditors, I thought then that any aspiration for me to actually help improve our business would be consumed with a life of compliance and governance duties. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the software systems that have made those responsibilities just a minor part-time job. I now recall my excitement these past years to use my freed-up time in a much more value-adding way to help our work force and executives improve our profit performance. This new twist has been a rewarding surprise. Also, I love my expanded role contributing to the Green and Sustainability movement to enable my organization to achieve a negative carbon footprint with money to spare to reduce global poverty. We are now only a year away. Yesterday my kids told me they want to grow up just like me. I’m a hero in their eyes.

Chief Information Officer (CIO)

Dear Diary of Spreadsheet-itis,

I still laugh about the prior CIO I replaced in 2025, who got fired when our business nearly collapsed from the week that all of our spreadsheets converged into an infinite closed loop system. All our laptops kept endlessly calculating and calculating. No new data could be input or information reported. Our company logo could have been replaced with the hourglass symbol. Spreadsheets are a disease, but I cured it with business intelligence systems. I wish I could laugh today about the dwindling size of my IT department – all the line and staff departments now do what we used to do for them. I guess buggy-whip makers somehow found new careers. I’ll survive.        

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Dear Diary of Relentless Pressure,

My fellow CEOs in 2025 dreamed that boards of directors would return to those ceremonial jobs for which you just showed up at quarterly board meetings to pick up your director’s check. In contrast, my board was certainly an activist one in 2025. I vividly recall trying to turn around my sagging business by training everyone with Six Sigma quality and lean management techniques. With hindsight, I am glad I shifted our attention to strategy execution and our culture to embrace measurements with accountability. Those strategy maps, scorecards, dashboards, and other performance management systems saved my tail. I realize now that Six Sigma and lean programs, though relevant, are limited in that they only teach employees how to think, but our strategy management methods and enabling software technologies taught us where to think. Better yet, they gave us the focus, traction, torque and yield regarding what actions to take to continually optimize to dynamic change. My next challenge? Grow my people. I hope my VP of human resources is thinking about that, too. 

With perfect hindsight, these diary entries could be true ones. With imperfect foresight, these C-suite executives would probably have far less successful events to relate. To sustain long-term success, an embrace of the full vision of the performance management framework is not optional – it is essential.