Once, a developer friend asked me: "It's very easy to know if someone is a good technician or not, you ask a question about an area of ​​expertise, and the person either knows or doesn't know. However, how can I go about finding out if a business person is a good professional?"
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In fact, although some questions can also be useful in such assessment, it is a much more difficult job. After all, business professionals, in contrast to developers, are not specialists in one topic, but often generalists across multiple topics.
To know whether this professional is good or not, we would have to evaluate him in several dimensions. However, some of these dimensions are related to soft skills, such as persuasion, public presentation, leadership, or even a combination of each.
Despite this, we can use the Pareto principle to find a key skill that has a great influence on the life of a business professional. If you could only choose one, which would it be?​
Considering that the main function of the business area is to make decisions, I would choose "Data Analytics", considering it the science of extracting conclusions by analyzing information. Skills such as critical thinking and systemic vision are good complements to my answer.​
However, it is important to remember that, in order to be able to draw conclusions from reliable data, it is necessary to first extract this data from some source, treat it, create data models, combine it with other sources, and coordinate these processes so that they happen periodically in order to keep an updated report, for example. I commented more on this type of challenge in my Data Engineering section.
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Nevertheless, equally or more important than being good at analyzing data, it is essential to know how to simplify analysis. Let me explain: I was once at the Bain & Company office for one of the finals of the Latin America Strategic Challenge. Talking to one of the partners about what makes a good consultant, he gave me the following answer:
"Everyone here is very competent. I believe that any of my colleagues would be able to make the right decisions when working on a project. What differentiates a good consultant from an excellent consultant is how much effort they will require from their teams to discover the answer."
In the business world, we often don't have all the information we would like for decision-making available.
Therefore, an excellent business professional is one who can optimize the success of their decisions, according to the amount of information they have in their hands. Searching for ALL available information would be extremely exhaustive, leading to what consultants call "boiling the ocean".
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In addition to arriving at the "correct answer", you want to get to it with the least effort and as quickly as possible. Knowing what NOT to analyze or waste time with is equally to or more important than knowing what to analyze.
For this, it is important to know how to structure problems and organize hypotheses, as I briefly mentioned in the Business Strategy section.
After all, would you rather work on a team where your boss asks you for thousands of analyses that lead nowhere, or on a team where your manager asks you to focus on a few investigations, which provide crucial information for project decision-making?