Visionary Leaders in Data & Analytics: Good to GREAT
Disclaimer: This content is for information only and reflects only my views. I am investment analyst at an investment bank (six years experience). This is my personal view of the characteristics of exceptional leadership, not a view of any kind of the companies mentioned.
There is a special “edge” of leaders in the data & analytics business that separates the best companies (and stocks) for investing and M&A that I’ve noticed from covering services companies across labor, education and data.
It’s what I’ll call a TRANSFORMATION VISION.
To illustrate I’ll share a brief anecdote of Henry Fernandez, the CEO of MSCI, a company that provides data and tools for the investment industry. Think the indexes used for investing, such as the “emerging markets index” or the idea of the “value” factor for investing.
At a recent investment conference, Henry addressed a crowd of analysts from hedge funds and mutual funds. The analysts with excel spreadsheets of accounting statements, taking diligent notes, the minds hard at work to make the hard decision of where to invest their client’s money. The topic is the “factor-investing” product, which is a computer-calculated index that invests using fundamental financial data. Henry tells the entire room of human analysts, the opportunity is huge because “really, you are all factor-investors.”
Now this is absolutely amazing to me. If you have been following the investment industry you’ve probably heard of passive (computer-driven) investing replacing active (human-driven) investing. What’s amazing is he’s telling his company’s shareholders (or potential shareholders) that his product can DO THEIR JOBS!
That’s a transformation vision. His leadership and mission for the company is to the investment community to (literally) make better decisions. Now the company’s addressable market is potentially every single investment businesses or over $80 trillion in managed assets, hedge funds, mutual funds, ETFs, advisors, anyone!
Contrast this to say, terminals, such as the Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters (now Refinitiv) which provide amazingly efficient access to information. These are equally resilient business models embedded in workflows with (historically) tight control of data distribution. They have achieved a missions of efficiency and access.
What can take this further? In my personal opinion, its this transformation vision leadership. This takes the data and analytics business model further — to TRANSFORM an industry.
Other examples of transformative visionary leaders, in my personal opinion, include Scott Stephenson the CEO of Verisk, which has a mission to help insurance businesses (among others) make better decisions, helping transform insurance workflow. Or Andrew Florance the CEO of CoStar, which has a mission to create efficiency and transparency in real-estate, helping digitize the entire industry.
Keep an eye out for these leaders! This is what I personally believes is key driver for taking the data & analytics model from good to GREAT.
*I want to tie it in with the good to GREAT concept (by Jim Collins) where this type of leadership also firmly focuses on “deeply passionate” and “best in the world” circles. There’s many other factors to consider for evaluating a company and this is a personal view on what I see as astounding leadership.
