A generation ago, sales people were repositories of information, and customers couldn’t make a purchase decision without consulting with sales people to find out more about the product. Sales people were gatekeepers of information, and in many ways, were in an advantageous position over the customer, because they had an “information asymmetry” in their favor – they knew more than the customer did.

Across many industries, both business planning and key decision-making are increasingly informed by big data. As pressure mounts to match business operations to the record pace of current, aggressive market innovation, more organizations are looking to base decisions on hard numbers in order to mitigate risk and raise return. But faulty interpretation of data invites error in deriving and applying insights. These new risks have created opportunities for the CFO to collaborate with both other members of the C-suite and human resources to usher in new ways of working and to obtain a competitive advantage in their markets.

Some 72 per cent of businesses have admitted to at least one strategic initiative failing to work in the last three years, as a result of flaws in their decision making process.

This is according to recent research from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), which claims that business leaders are struggling to make the correct decisions.

As Stewart Butterfield envisioned it, his corporate-messaging app Slack was designed to alleviate the effects of endless e-mails, text messages, and phone calls. “We’re selling a reduction in information overload,” Butterfield wrote in a memo to staff before the release of Slack in 2013.

Instead, Slack has become one more thing to check for many of the 2.7 million users of the chat service. Still, people are hungry for more digital communications, whether it’s with colleagues on Slack, friends on Snapchat, or acquaintances on Facebook, Butterfield said in an onstage interview at the Bloomberg Businessweek Design Conference.

As Stewart Butterfield envisioned it, his corporate-messaging app Slack was designed to alleviate the effects of endless e-mails, text messages, and phone calls. “We’re selling a reduction in information overload,” Butterfield wrote in a memo to staff before the release of Slack in 2013.

In today’s economy, every company is seeking better ways to be more competitive and cost effective to generate financial growth. But ever since the decline of the industrial age and the birth of the digital age, The United States has struggled for market share due to competition with foreign, highly educated, low wage workforces which has stifled growth, innovation and product development.

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Learning is an amazing gift that we all have available to us. However, there is another side to learning that will prevent your success. It is quite common for entrepreneurs to seek out as much knowledge as possible to discover new strategies and tactics to take their business to the next level. Unfortunately, too much learning can also get in the way of your growth.

Magazine Article “Death by Information Overload”