“Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely on you to give them a voice” – Stephen Few

1. Build data: The farther the info from data the more it will be imperfect. Every info has a context and only data can explain it. Engage people and processes to organically generate the data. The body throw the foreign object that does not fit to our body needs. The external data has to be made compatible to the company's digestion system. Make a practice to build data warehouse from internal and external sources. Make the cross functional team to populate data warehouse. Let the team be headed by person qualified and experienced in diverse fields like, finance, IT, strategy, planning etc. Do not rely solely on ERP or any accounting software, always remember a lot of knowledge resides with people who are not engaged.

2. Build intelligence: The process of generating knowledge from data and the process of digesting the knowledge both needs intelligence. Information will always be imperfect and hence has to be complemented by intelligence. Intelligence is a mixture of patterns, intuition and innovation. AI and ML deals heavily with patterns and technology can be of great help in it. Intuition and innovation is still needed to to make the AI and ML work interactively for desired result. This is the reason why business models and entrepreneurship is not a copy paste for success. While the knowledge is organic so should be the products and services i.e. it should decompose when loose it's Unique Sales Proposition(USP) or Value Proposition (VP), giving rise to fresh USP/VP. And the same applies to the business model.

3. Disrupt proactively: Disruption is inevitable. Prefer to handle it proactively rather than re-actively. Economist's concept of perfect competition is no longer possible due to imperfect use of resources by different entrepreneurs and market forces. Imperfection is driven by entrepreneurs and hence decisions with imperfect information is an attempt to make your entrepreneurial model perfect to en-cash imperfection. Disrupt organically so that your existing customers keep on buying your renewed and more relevant products and services. This will minimize the risk of decision with imperfect information without loosing the opportunity to grow with new inorganic customers.

Madhukar Talele, Mentoring and CFO Services