| Sunday, 30 July 2023 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Thank God for Sundays, right?
Speaking of God, many of us would’ve heard the following quote: “In God we trust. All others bring data.”
It comes from the late American statistician, professor, author, and all-round management guru, W Edwards Deming.
Deming was born in 1900, so much of his considerable (and still relevant) insights around management and work came from an era where data and technology were expensive and hard to access. Thus, much of Deming’s formidable body of work, and quotes, comes from an era where businesses did not place much emphasis on data.
The world we live in today isn’t short of data. In fact, we have too much of it. Whether you’re a small business that sells tchotchkes online, a restaurant, or a factory, you’re generating anywhere from thousands to millions of data points every few weeks.
Gather enough of it, and it will always throw up insights that look tempting to act upon. To invert Deming’s quote into a question: if everyone brings data, who do you trust?
No, I’m not looping back to God. This isn’t one of those newsletters.
Instead, I want to switch to a call I made last week to Harshil Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Razorpay, the Indian payments and fintech giant last valued at over US$7.5 billion.
I did not ask Harshil about data, but about his most reliable mental model or First Principles when it came to major decisions at Razorpay. As it turns out, Harshil ended up sharing something along similar lines.
“I talk to customers. It’s a simple First Principle, but a lot of times, companies forget about it. The idea isn’t to understand the how, but the what or why. As organisations get larger, they start to have large teams of in-house experts. They give you a filtered view, based often on market research. Internal expertise, in many ways, becomes a bottleneck,” he said.
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Harshil Mathur
CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
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Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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