72 Kellogg Insight “In theory, the best manager for analytics is the one who walks into the office every morning and flips a coin to make all decisions,” Anderson says. “Because if you make all your decisions by flipping a coin, you will generate the best possible data for your analytics engine.” “The problem,” he adds, “is that at every company, the manager flipping coins gets fired very quickly. The managers who survive are the ones who are really good at implementing decisions with great precision.” To understand how the best teams can find their operations too opti - mized for their own good, Anderson offers this hypothetical example. “Right now your company offers two-day delivery, and someone says to you, ‘I would like you to go back and analyze the historical data. Tell me whether we should have two-day delivery or move to one-day delivery.’ Could you answer that question with your data?” If your delivery process is being overseen by a high-performing team focused squarely on efficiency, then you likely cannot answer this ques- tion with data. “If you are really good at delivery—if you’ve been running operations efficiently—how many days does it take? Two days,” says Anderson. “The guy who was messing up and taking four days to deliver a package was fired. The one who was delivering in three days sometimes and one day other times got fired. You’re left with all of the managers who deliver in two days—you’ve built an organization that is so good at delivering things that it almost always happens in two days.” Hamstrung by your own success, you do not have the data to know whether a better possible delivery strategy exists, or how you might suc - cessfully move to a new model. Based on insights from Eric T. Anderson and Florian Zettelmeyer