The Data Hero Playbook: Developing Your Data Leadership Superpowers

Are you a data leader tasked to promote a culture of data-enabled decision making within your company? Are you passionate about helping your company, or your clients, to realize the transformative power of data? If yes, then your timing couldnt be any better - and youve come to the right place. This book is dedicated to sharing insights on the behaviors, and more importantly the mindset, that data leaders must adopt to succeed in an era of constant change and AI-fueled disruption. The rise of the digital age has brought the critical importance, and potential value, of data to the forefront for most senior business executives. The idea of data as the new oil has spread like wildfire over the last decade, fueled by the explosive growth of Netflix, Uber, and other digital natives that have built successful businesses around their ability to leverage data for competitive advantage. A desire to extract value from data and digitally transform led many companies to hire Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and significantly invest in data and analytics functions. The more recent explosion of AI has only intensified this focus on data, and the expectations for CDOs and their teams are high. This focus on data puts the hard-working professionals tasked with managing and optimizing data within large companies in a unique and potentially lucrative position. The process used to extract raw data and refine it into valuable business insights requires a combination of specialized skills found only in data and analytics functions. This is particularly the case with Artificial Intelligence, which puts everyone in the data and AI value chain at a distinct advantage in terms of their individual growth opportunities. As data can transform businesses, it can also transform careers. Upon conversations with many business professionals, Hawker discovered that despite significant investments in AI and data, companies were not realizing its full potential. The root of the problem is a negative mindset of those people and companies engaged in the practice of managing data. This mindset promotes a culture in data teams that reinforces the status quo and stunts any meaningful opportunities for to embrace change. It is the biggest reason why so many companies see the incredible potential from data yet fail to realize its promise. This negative mindset provides fertile ground for the creation of a dysfunctional relationship between the producers and consumers of data, and it disempowers data leaders from innovating and influencing any meaningful changes to their organizational cultures. It reinforces an inward focus that puts more value on the management of data than customer satisfaction, and in doing so it inverts the entire data value proposition. Empowering data leaders to do away with these old ways of thinking in favor of new, more productive perspectives, is the core theme of the book. Hawker calls this new way of thinking Heroic Data Leadership, an approach that jettisons the negative mindsets which no longer serve data professionals, and wildly embraces those which take a more positive view of their role, their customers, and their data. In doing so, this new mindset will enable hard-working and well-intentioned leaders to become the data heroes their organizations so desperately need, and it will finally allow organizations to realize the full potential of their data. The Data Hero Playbook includes: Specific recommendations of behaviors needed to embrace more positive mindsets Quotes and anecdotes from people running a data function at large companies today Fictional stories / narratives describing the transition of data practitioners from negative mindsets (current state), to more positive mindsets (future states). Ultimately, theres never been a better time to be in a data career, and Hawker helps leaders find their ideal path.