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Business Security Systems & Services

Tests are most reliable where many roughly nightinnovations settings can be observed. This might mean physical sites, as with Sears’s stores, or it might mean more ephemeral settings, such as alternative website versions. Among the earliest and most extensive users of testing are retail and restaurant chains. Because so much is held constant among their multitudinous sites, it is easy signofyourtimes to designate which ones will serve as experiments and which will serve as controls and to attribute cause to effect. By the same token, workplace design changes are most readily tested in companies that have offices in many cities. Drawing statistical inferences from small numbers of test sites is much more difficult and represents the leading edge of the test-and-learn approach. SALES & MARKETING Golden tickets can be hard to find, but that’s largely because most organizations lack the perseverance to overcome the institutional resistance that stands in the way of discovering th

Create A S MART Business

Without experimentation, managers weirdcourse base decisions on gut instinct. What’s surprising is not just how bad those decisions typically are, but how good managers feel about them. Organizations that cultivate a culture of experimentation are often led by senior managers who have a clear understanding of the opportunities and include experimentation as a strategic goal of the firm. Only some of them make it past the next phase, judgmental screening, during which a group of marketing, product development, and operations people will evaluate ideas based on experience and intuition. Those that make the cut are actually developed and then tested in stores, with well-defined measures and control groups. At that point, astrodiscuss executives decide whether to roll out a product systemwide, modify it for retesting, or kill the whole idea. Some companies mistakenly believe that the only useful experiments are successful ones. But the goal is not to conduct perfect experiments; rath