For many, the idea of offloading work onto others, especially people we don’t really know, is a difficult idea. The thought of entrusting a stranger with any part of our business seems like a disaster waiting to happen. But even the biggest and best find ways to delegate their workload, often to employees who may not have the motivation to get the job done well.

Often we are bogged down under deadlines, huge reports, and marketing pushes to really take a look at the bigger picture. We get used to the idea of working under pressure, and it’s common knowledge that stress and poor time management can lead to sometimes costly mistakes. Escaping from this mindset enables us to take a long view at how we delegate our tasks, and that actually, outsourcing is a vital tool to freeing us to concentrate on the core business.

Control

Data can tell us so many stories – we get to learn from it and make conclusions that we otherwise wouldn’t. The key to getting the most out of data’s capability to tell stories is to share those stories. This is why scientists, business people, sociologists and so on like to show us charts and talk about what they learned.

No matter what kind of data you are dealing with – industry research, public data or proprietary data – the best way to tell its story is to visually represent it.

This is where most misunderstandings happen. People think that they can just throw in a few pie charts into their presentation and that it would make it good. But, the key to getting it right is really just understanding the process.

Why do you need a visual representation?

I have been teaching an executive course called  for four years and the tool that I consider to be most important to good operating model work is something I call a Value Chain Map.  For those of you who work on processes, a Value Chain Map is a high-level process map or value stream map: the term value chain coming from the strategy literature. I prefer the term value chain because it reminds me that we are trying to link operations to strategy.