Andrew Mason’s farewell note underscores the limits of big data
Published by Quartz News on March 1, 2013 By Venkat Viswanathan,
CEO of LatentView Analytics  Yesterday, Groupon CEO and founder,
Andrew Mason, announced his ousting with a quirky letter. In it,
he pointed to the following misstep in management:   In the end,
understanding customers is quite simple—engage with them; listen
to them; derive insights from data you have on them; show them
you care; and manage your interactions with them proactively. Is
there room for intuition in all this? Absolutely! Business
decisions primarily rely on interpreting data well (even when
you have limited data), and exercising sound judgment, honed
through intuition, on what to focus on.  In an e-commerce
business that tends to rely on building digital platforms with
automated decisions, the importance of human judgment is
sometimes underestimated, and lack of data blamed for decisions
gone wrong. In a business context, machines can’t imagine the
future well enough y