Beyond Business Analytics: The Foundations of Behavioral Perspective Theory

228 Pages·2022·1.984 MB·English

by  Eliezer Geisler

Eliezer Geisler
Beyond Business
Analytics
The Foundations of
Behavioral Perspective
Theory
Beyond Business Analytics
Eliezer Geisler
Beyond Business
Analytics
The Foundations of Behavioral Perspective Theory
Eliezer Geisler
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-43717-6 ISBN 978-3-030-43718-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43718-3
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For Hani
Preface
The genesis of this book can be traced to my doctoral dissertation, several
decades ago. At that time, I was awarded a research grant from the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This was in the
late 1970s. The race to the moon had already been concluded and with
it the United States had won a great victory over the Soviet Union. Pres-
ident Kennedy’s wish to land a man on the moon and bring him back
before the decade of the 1960s is out had been accomplished. The Amer-
ican public’s interest in space was beginning to wane. Congress started to
inquire whether additional funding should be given to NASA, and more
importantly, what was the revised mission of the agency, now that the race
to the moon had been completed.
NASA was an organization in a state of flux and change. The managers
of the agency wanted to know how to measure, perhaps even quantify
these changes, so, as one of them put it succinctly: “we’ll know what we
are dealing with, so that we can make reasonable decisions.” My task, as
specified in my research grant, was to propose a system which would help
NASA managers to monitor the process of transition they were facing,
from space explorations to a more “earthly-oriented” research and devel-
opment effort. This revised focus would then help NASA’s government
officials to make better decisions here on earth.
My doctoral dissertation was titled: “An Empirical Study of a Proposed
System for Monitoring Organizational Change in a Federal R&D Labo-
ratory.” Empirically, to make the study more feasible. I concentrated on
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viii PREFACE
one of the five NASA regional laboratories. The director of the laboratory
and his team of scientists, engineers, and managers, were graciously highly
cooperative, thus making my experience at the laboratory very productive
as well as enjoyable.
Since then, over the years, I conducted research in a large number
of R&D and technological organizations, in the United States, Europe,
and South America. I had interviewed and routinely interacted with a
substantial number of scientists, engineers, departmental managers, and
directors of these worldwide organizations.
During my graduate studies, I was very fortunate to receive intellec-
tual inputs from several faculty members of Northwestern University,
in particular my dissertation advisor professor Michael Radnor; and
the members of my doctoral committee: professors Albert Rubenstein,
Charles Thompson, Robert Boruch, and Haskel Benishay. With their
guidance, I was able to find several salient attributes of the decision-
makers in these organizations, and identify some interesting aspects of
their processes of making these decisions. Most importantly, I was able to
construct a system for the monitoring and measuring of these processes.
At the same time, I was constantly wondering: “what is being done
with all the data/information that was being collected in these target
organizations?” Some of the data was used to analyze the decision
processes, but much of the data was just collected, classified, and stored,
without a clear mandate for the implementation or usage by the decision-
makers. It was also abundantly clear to me that this phenomenon was
also occurring in all the organizations I was studying. Their managers
routinely collected vast amounts of data, from the various divisions and
functions of the organization. Also, interestingly, highly respected orga-
nizational behavior scholars at the time encouraged the collection of such
data, usually as an instrument for strategic planning.
As discussed later in this book, the managers of these firms collected
information on the functions, the processes and the activities of their
financial system, their product or service acquisition of resources, the
outputs and marketing effort of their product or service, their interactions
with external organizations, and other data/information of the internal
processes of their organization. In all these organizations I encountered
the phenomenon of massive data acquisition and accumulation. Every
organization was essentially mired in vast amounts of data/information.
One manager compared this to the pile of municipal garbage. One has to
sift through the entire pile to find a desired object.
PREFACE ix
For me it was comparable to an episode in AD 1209, when Pope
Innocent III decided to deal with the sect of the Cathars who lived in
the French town of Beziers and were Christians but had rejected the
papal authority, and thus were considered by the Pope to be heretics.
The Pope sent an army, led by the French nobleman Simon de Monfort,
to conquer and destroy the Cathars. De Monfort ordered the citizens of
Beziers to deliver to him the Cathars. The citizens refused. Accompanied
by the Pope’s representative, a monk named Arnaud Amalric, Simon the
Monfort then attacked the town, killing about 20 thousand people, and
then proceeded to burn the town.
When asked how should they distinguish between Catholic and Cathar,
Amalric famously said: “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.”
In a similar mode, managers assemble great quantities of data and then
proceed to sort through the data in order to identify and to extract the
desired individual data items. The idea is to have at the manager’s disposal
a large set of data, with the underlying assumption that within this mass
of raw data there exists the desired piece of information.
I also sadly discovered that most, if not all, of these organizations
lacked a formal system for the utilization of this mass of data/information
they had collected in the process they used in making decisions, most
importantly, strategic decisions. This was a peculiar phenomenon.
Organizational behavior scholars have long advocated and encouraged
the managers of business firms to collect, store, and possibly to utilize this
mass of data/information. At the same time these scholars were reluctant
to construct a system of implementation of such data and their utilization
in making decisions, nor to offer a feasible way of how to effectively utilize
such data. This was the situation across organizations of all types, sizes,
functions, and managerial strategies, whereby an insurmountable schism
had been opened between the acquisition of data/information, and their
possible usage in the firm’s decision-making processes.
This book proposes a potential solution, in the form of the Behav-
ioral Perspective Theory (BPT). This innovative theory advances the idea
that the behavior of decision-makers should be designed to take into
account the objective of the ultimate perspective of the organization:
why are we making these decisions, and how do these decisions impact
the ultimate goals of the organizations? That is, the decision made by
organizational members are based not only on the qualitative and the
quantitative attributes of the problem for which a decision is warranted,
but also on the intellectual space between this problem and the ultimate
x PREFACE
goals (perspectives) of the organization. How decisions made in lower
levels of the organizational hierarchy eventually affect the higher levels of
the organization, through a process of “continuous clustering,” by which
the variables or dimensions of lower levels of the hierarchy are assembled
into coherent higher-level constructs, which then they are clustered to
allow them to reach the point where they impact the ultimate goals, or
perspective, of the organization.
Chicago, USA Eliezer Geisler
Contents
1 The Notion of Business Analytics 1
2 The Notion of Beyond Business Analytic: Examples
of Business Applications 33
3 The Concept of Beyond Business Analytics 49
4 Representations of Organizational Events 57
5 Beyond Business Analytics: Illustrative Cases
in Human History 109
6 The Power of the Few 123
7 Beyond Business Analytics and the Pursuit of World
Peace 137
8 Beyond Business Analytics: How Good Products
Made by Good Companies Fail in the Marketplace 157
9 Beyond Business Analytics: How Good Public
Organizations Fail in Their Mission 175
10 The Road Ahead 201
Bibliography 203
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