The disadvantages of asking people to rate themselves are obvious. For instance: You could fake your way to a higher score, or you might lack self-awareness. But self-report surveys have advantages, too. They make data collection efficient, and nobody but you has 24-7 access to your thoughts, feelings, and behavior. And here’s another benefit many people don’t consider: The act of answering the questions can promote greater self-awareness, which opens the door to self-development.

A good psychometric test can easily outperform a résumé scan and interview at predicting job performance and retention. Yet personality testing and other ways of analyzing potential present some significant challenges: For instance, not all assessments pass the sniff test, and people’s personalities vary from moment to moment, often depending on the challenge at hand. We need a finer-grained understanding of human potential.

Findings don’t have to be earth-shattering to be useful. In fact, obvious insights can help you overcome three barriers to change in your organization: resistance to new data (“But that’s not what my experience has shown”), resistance to change itself (“But that’s the way we’ve always done it”), and organizational uniqueness bias (“That will never work here”). You can also gain trust by confirming what people already believe.

Football players who seem mediocre in college suddenly flourish as top pro performers, while hot prospects flounder when they reach the NFL. Can teams’ recruiters and coaches accurately identify the key players that will help their team win games based on the players’ past performance? In this episode of Counterpoints, Wharton professor Cade Massey, host of “Wharton Moneyball,” argues that they can’t.

This episode of Counterpoints examines the strategic value of data analytics — and more to the point, whether the data scientists creating the analysis are being rewarded appropriately for their contribution to strategy.

While many businesses have embraced the idea that analytics can help improve performance, there are plenty of skeptics. Can analytics really show business leaders something old-fashioned intuition can’t? In this podcast episode, analytics expert Ben Alamar seeks proof that analytics really do lead to improved results.

The value of big data is being captured by large companies, but many small businesses are being left behind. One reason: Investors get more data from larger companies, so that’s where they place their bets. Startup and small business owners must think about their data as a new class of economic asset and understand their data helps investors assess them—which affects their ability to raise capital.

In this episode of the sports analytics podcast, Counterpoints looks at the unusual case of Larry Murphy, a right-handed hockey defenseman whose support for Hall of Fame lefthanders helped two teams win the Stanley Cup in the 1990s. Was this outcome due to a unique quality Murphy brought to the game, or does a more general strategy of finding complementary talents improve team performance?

To improve decision quality, risk management, and leadership development, organizations and teams should record individual expectations when making big group decisions. That may sound like a tall order, especially for a large organization. But interactive dashboards can make the process of gathering and analyzing everyone’s input much less cumbersome, and the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.

Our research on KPIs suggests there is no clear best practice when it comes to relying on data versus intuition to make strategic decisions.

This episode of the sports analytics podcast Counterpoints shows that the greatest legal advantage in sports is a good night’s sleep. Using wearable devices to monitor athletes’ sleep, physiologists have shown that at least 8 hours of sleep can greatly improve performance — with implications not just for sports, but all areas of business and daily life.

Companies can monetize data internally to optimize operations and client services. They can also leverage that data across various client use cases.

MIT Sloan Management Review and MIT Sloan School of Management will chat on Twitter (#MITSMRChat) about the intersection of business and sports analytics. Participants will learn how insights from the sports industry can help companies in other industries excel at performance measurement.

A winning record seems like it would help teams draw more fans to their games, yet there’s plenty of evidence that even losing teams can be profitable — sometimes more so than winners. This episode of the sports analytics podcast Counterpoints looks at the problem of selling a product with unpredictable performance by focusing on baseball.

In this episode of the Counterpoints podcast, we look at how sports analytics measures “basketball IQ” — and how this metric explains the improbable success of 8-time NBA All Star point guard Steve Nash.

Insight into what customers really care about often is hampered by the quality of the information being collected. Big data can support smart market research, but only if researchers embrace psychometric best practices and the basics of understanding what it is they want to measure and how. That means asking the right questions, asking enough questions, understanding how to weigh questions, and taking into consideration how people felt about the brand to begin with.

Even a highly skilled, knowledge-based industry like management consulting — one worth $250 billion and filled with some of the smartest people on the planet — is vulnerable to the same market forces that are disrupting services everywhere, including AI.

Data is recognized as a business asset, but we lack efficient ways to price it, says MIT professor Munther Dahleh. In this Q&A, he proposes a marketplace that bases the cost of data on the financial value it generates.

MIT Sloan Management Review and Google’s new cross-industry survey about key performance indicators (KPIs) asked senior executives to explain how they and their organizations are using KPIs in the digital era. The results shed light on the challenges and emerging opportunities companies face when using KPIs, demonstrate the many ways advanced use of KPIs can benefit organizations, and offer steps executives can take to make the most of KPIs going forward.

A new MIT SMR study measured the role of KPIs in aligning an organization toward its objectives. Three categories emerged: Measurement Leaders, Measurement Capable, and Measurement Challenged. Take this self-assessment to uncover challenges and opportunities based on your score — and find out what group you are in.