The Thomke Talks Episode 2: Making good management decisions

As companies were moving online, there were real questions about how to actually optimize customer experience tourists thought that we really don't know very much about what customers like and what they don't like and how do they behave.

And it was really exciting to see basically Another revolution in this space, which, you know, optimisely is part of. And that is to change the way decisions, management decisions are being made. The reality is, and I know a lot of companies don't wanna face that, is that most of the times when it comes to innovation, we are wrong.

I found sort of in my own research that even the experts, when it comes to innovation, are wrong most of the time.

So now the question is, how then do we make actually good decisions? And that's where the role of experiments come in. You know, rather than trying to sort of rather than believing that we actually know everything, that management knows everything. And then later finding out that actually wrong, why not just sort of use business experiments to show us with scientific rigor what works and what doesn't work.

And so there's actually optimizing sort of customer experiences online. In some ways, still sort of at the beginning. The beginning, I think, of a management revolution, because if you think about the company of the future that's kind of build around experimentation, that requires kind of a new leadership style, a new way of managing. It's more evidence based than it probably is to day, and it's truly exciting because it allows companies, first of all, to be more productive.

But even better, it allows them to create customer experiences that are better than anything that we can experience today.

So I'm really sort of I'm truly excited. In fact, you know, I think we're all part of a movement, really a movement sort of to bring this scientific method to management.

And to fundamentally sort of revolutionize sort of how decisions are made, there's a lot of work to be done. I mean, it's wonderful kind of to see this sort of to go all the way from when I started out in nineteen ninety, when we did design experiments, really in a kind of an engineering environment, to now really revolutionizing sort of, customer experience in sort of the digital spaces. As an academic, right? I mean, what really gets us excited is not just publishing stuff, but what gets us excited is also if people start to use the kinds of things that we write about have impact in practice.

Okay? And to see kind of some of these ideas now really sort of impacting practice is, is something that we all live for. I mean, this is what we do as academics that we all strive for