The Future of Analytics

With history and law in my educational background, few people, including me, would have predicted back in 1981 that I would become one of the first in my career of community destination marketing to embrace analytics.

Although I took statistics, in essence history is a form of analytical thinking.  But back in 1972 when I earned a degree in that major it was less likely to involve data.

Law school certainly teaches critical thinking but not open-mindedness.

As NYU Stern researcher Dr. Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, put it this week on the Diane Rehm Show:

“But as soon as we want to reach a conclusion, or as soon as we get emotional, we get angry and open-minded thinking shuts down and we become lawyers.”

Researchers know today that the natural talent for analytics that I began to tap into in the early 1980s is a competitive advantage that was central to the DMOs I led being able to quickly leapfrog more established competitors.

Unfortunately, other than various aspects, I was never really able to teach it to others on staff before I retired at the end of 2009, with the exception of my eventual successor.

Even so, she had an innate talent for analytics. You can teach skills but not talents, especially not nuance.

Rare even among those now formally trained in analytics is the ability or talent to see nuanced patterns and then apply them strategically to an objective.

Research conducted by MIT’s Sloan Management Review and SAS calculates that only 12% of organizations overall have this ability.

More than a third are “analytically challenged” and more than half are “analytic practitioners” that employ it primarily for operations, sometimes predictively, although that is not their focus.

So one-in-eight of these organizations are “analytic innovators” which are found to be seven times as likely to employ analytics predictively and six times more likely to deploy it prescriptively.

The Sloan/SAS report entitled The Talent Dividend well worth downloading, reading and applying.

Recently, while writing an essay about what organizations such I led will look like in the future, I noted that analytical ability will soon be required for every job in an organization, kind of like how keyboard skills became in the 1990s.

When I retired, still only 37% of organizations overall saw analytics as a competitive advantage.  This peaked at 67% in 2012 and is now a view held by six-in-ten organizations.

But I believe the true value of analytics going forward will always be strategic including innovation.

Another’s Inspirational Odyssey

A friend of mine still in her 20s living in Durham is a kindred spirit of sorts.

She has that blend of discoverer and deliverer that is the foundation for entrepreneurial spirits who are able to build and sustain innovative organizations.

She, too, sort of backed into her career and like I was at her age, curious about why she has so quickly been labeled an innovator.

Recently, I shared with her some of the kindred spirits who reached out to me when I arrived in Durham 26 years ago to build and grow what would be my fourth start-up in a long ago concluded career in a field different from hers.

I’ll share who they were in another essay some day, but like I am to her, they were old enough to be my grandparents.  I guess innovators can identify one another across generations.

But I wonder if one of my young friend’s early influences was her decision after college to bicycle with some friends on a route from coast to coast.

Let me explain why such a trip should also be a job requirement for anyone hoping to be involved in community destination marketing, as I was.

My friend and her companions biked east to west roughly following the old Bikecentennial route pioneered 40 years ago by a handful of other entrepreneurial innovators.

Back then, more than 4,000 cyclists to bike took part in portions of the route during the summer of 1976, 2,000 of whom completed the entire journey.

That was the year after I took the helm of my second startup, the first truly as the executive and a full-fledged community marketing organization.

By 1978, as I headed to Anchorage to complete another startup, the Bikecentennial had inspired AASHTO to recognize the existence of what is becoming a national system of bicycle routes.

It was an endeavor that would span the remainder of my career and beyond.  Today, 8,043 miles have been established involving 16 states with 40 states overall working on various routes.  Propelling it to its completion is still that original startup.

The transcontinental route my friend took is a slight variation of what is now U.S. Bicycle Route 76.

I was surprised to learn that the toughest mountainous segment was not the 68.6 mile, 3,341 ft. climb from Fort Collins over the 8,063.45 ft. pass on the southern route to Laramie.

Nor was it climbing over the Continental Divide in the Wind River Mountains or up along my native Tetons or then across the Bitterroots or up over the mile-high Lolo pass and through the canyons of the Clearwater.

It was just north of Durham in the southwestern Virginia portion of the Appalachians where, the Messersmiths, a line of my ancestors, had settled in the 1700s before heading west.

It was the hardest segment, not just because it was only a few days into their ride but, because the roads were so windy and the grades so much more difficult.

But the toughest portion of the whole journey was the relatively flat variation on the route they took down the Washington state side of the Columbia River Gorge before crossing over to Portland, due to riding against the wind blowing up the Gorge from the Pacific that makes it a haven for windsurfing.

When you discuss routes to the coast in Oregon, people usually refer to them in relationship to a series of colleges stretching down I-5.  Cannon is across from Portland State and Lewis & Clark College.

The beach at Lincoln City is across from Willamette University in Salem where I started law school.  Newport Beach is across from Oregon State in Corvallis.

UBR 76 ends at Florence Beach, across from the University of Oregon in Eugene but my friend’s more than 4,000 mile ride ended on Cannon Beach with its picturesque Haystack Rock.

These beaches are seared into my memory just as they were on 9/11 during a visit.  I first saw news about the initial plane crashing into the World Trade Center as I came in from watching the fog at Bandon.

It was eerie driving up the coast along each of these beaches on a bright, sunny day.  Each of these little towns almost seemed deserted including during an overnight at Cannon Beach.

Hearing about her journey across Kansas reminded me of the jestful lyrics to a song entitled Nickels Worth of Difference:

“There ain’t a nickels worth of difference in Kansas and Nebraska

A lot of wide open spaces, every now and then a tree

But I suppose if you were born and raised around there you might beg to differ

Yeah but I’m from Oklahoma, it looks pretty much the same to me”

While singer-songwriter Tom Skinner was playing off the ribbing that goes on between states, he puts his finger on how geographic stereotypes can predisposition some of us to miss distinctions.

They are clear as you drive cross country in a Jeep as my English Bulldog and I have along various routes at least eight different times since I retired.  I can only imagine how much more clear they are when viewed from a bicycle or walking.

Research shows that the vast majority of us are drawn to these distinctions when we travel while a much smaller share is drawn to places that look and feel indistinct or to replicas of where they live.

It is a bit like the difference that distinguishes the small number of executives who are “innovator-deliverers” from the vast majority who, as just “deliverers,” ultimately create stagnation.

In sense-of-place parlance, it is the difference that distinguishes “stayers” who safeguard the communities in which they live from “boomers,” otherwise reasonable people who lacking those sensibilities seem to trample or homogenize it instead.

I’m getting the itch for another cross-country trip with Mugs.

The Unpretentious Role of Historic Sites

Well, for three reasons it was a big week for history last week in Durham, North Carolina.

Even among those involved in tourism, most people don’t realize that a greater percentage of travelers visit historic sites than attend concerts, theater and dance performances combined.

Travelers who take in historic sites also outnumber those who golf or attend/participate in pro and amateur sports combined.  They also outnumber those going to theme/amusement parks, zoos/aquariums and water parks combined.

Soon those visiting historic sites will rival the number attending conventions and meetings or going to the beach or other waterfronts.

And because historic sites are also on the most authentic end of the spectrum of activities, they add destination appeal even for those participating in those more mainstream activities.

First, on Sunday a week ago the Bull City (Durham’s nick name) celebrated the re-enactment by Bennett Place of the surrender here ending the Civil War 150 years ago.

It would be another 58 years before the state took stewardship as a historic site.  More on the history of that endeavor later.

The next day, in Atlanta, three of those involved in the startup of the Durham History Hub including executive director Katie Spencer were asked by The Museum Group to be one of its five prestigious “conversations at AAM.”

TMG is a consortium of 31 of the top museum consultants in the world.  AAM is the American Alliance of Museums which was holding it annual meeting in Atlanta.

They wanted to hear more about the Durham’s History Hub, which they characterized as “a sustainable new model for community-based museums” affectionately termed by a friend and historian as an avatar for the day there is a Museum of Durham History.

But Katie Spencer is no avatar.  She is rapidly rising star and the startup has already mounted an incredible 18 exhibitions at the “Hub” in less than 24 months.  Hopefully Durham can keep her.

Her work in Durham caught the attention of those at AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums because the pop-up exhibitions at the Hub are an ingenious way to help officials and community leaders here understand why a Museum of Durham History has been ranked for decades by residents as the #1 cultural need.

The pop-ups also serve to identify residents who have artifacts that could be loaned and safeguarded when a full-fledged history museum becomes a reality.

Durham’s third history event last week took place on Wednesday when the state’s three historic sites here were celebrated by nearly 400 people attending the Annual Tribute Luncheon which is facilitated for the community by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau.

A video reenactment wove the pre and post role that Historic Stagville, Bennett Place and Duke Homestead played in the history of not only Durham but especially the transformation of North Carolina.

After some editing, the video will be posted at this link along with a handful of the more than 20 Durham Annual Tribute Luncheons DCVB has produced over the past two decades.

North Carolina’s 27 state historic sites have been systematically starved through repeated budget cuts going back to shortly after I was recruited here 26 years ago, notwithstanding their importance to the state’s appeal for economic development.

Lawmakers today seem to have become unmoored from the public value of these sites as it was so well understood by their peers in 1923 when Bennett Place was donated as a state historic site, nearly 50 years before gaining national recognition.

The state apparently took possession of Bennett Place more than a decade before it began keeping track of theses assets in 1937.

It had been preserved and donated to the state by the Durham founder’s second generation in honor of its first.  Within six years, this generation went on to salvage Duke Homestead.

But it became a National Historic Landmark seven years before it became a North Carolina State Historic Site in 1973 at a time when Margaret Haywood was working to ensure the oldest of Durham’s now three state historic sites would be preserved.

For more than 25 years, Bennett Place fell under the precursor to the State Department of Economic Development showing that lawmakers and businesses back then and through the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s better understood the link of historic sites to economic development.

In 1955, Bennett Place was transferred along with by then 11 other state historic sites to to the newly created Department of Archives and History.

Less than two decades later, the nation including North Carolina were swept up in preparations for celebration of the America’s Bicentennial and Duke Homestead and Historic Stagville became state historic sites.

A decade earlier, Duke Homestead became a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and then part of the state’s historic sites, which in 1975 became its own unit in the Department of Cultural Resources.

Of course, the unique historic sites owned and operated by the state represent only 27 of the 2,780 Tar Heel listings on the National Register of Historic Places including 500 historic districts.

Only 15% are publically owned but 25% are of significance at the state level and another 5% at the national level.

Today, North Carolina Historic Sites are funded at roughly the same amount they were two decades ago or 54% less accounting for inflation even though the number of sites has increased.

This slow starvation has been bipartisan in nature, even though in the early 1970s voters overwhelmingly embedded an amendment to the state constitution to “conserve and protect”…”for the benefit of all its citizenry”…to preserve as a part of the common heritage its”…”historic sites”…

Although economic analysis of cultural assets shows a 7-to-1 return to governments on dollars spent on museums and cultural organizations, North Carolina invests only 52 cents per person on state historic sites, less than 2 cents per site.

Because they can also be leveraged into visitor centric economic development, the state has rightfully come to think of the 78 assets it began to accumulate beginning in 1879, such as historic sites, museums, zoos/aquariums and parkland/recreation areas, as “attractions.”

Unfortunately, state government doesn’t or isn’t able to conduct the analysis that would credit these “attractions” with the overall tax revenues they help harvest.

If that day comes, maybe lawmakers will resource them accordingly.