Tom Davenport

Tom Davenport's Speech Descriptions

Tom Davenport travels the world to provoke, stimulate, and equip audiences with the cutting edge ideas, strategies and practices he’s developed based on his own pioneering research. A potent force in transforming business practices, Tom possesses the ability to make even the most complex and sophisticated concepts accessible and applicable.

His speaking topics cover a wide range of current – and future – topics critical to the mission of any successful business, although in recent years he has primarily spoken on analytics, management techniques and decision-making.

Judgment Calls: Building Better Organizational Judgement
Many organizations have trouble making consistently good decisions. Some, however, demonstrate the ability to make wise, effective decisions over and over again. They have developed a capability for “organizational judgment” through a variety of different means. Some are highly analytical and data-based in their decision-making. Others involve multiple people in the decision process through social media or more conventional techniques. Some simply have a well-defined decision process that encourages honesty, self-examination, and dissent. In this presentation, Tom Davenport will describe the roots of organizational judgment as revealed in a major research project and book, Judgment Calls: Twelve Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams that Got Them Right, and the many benefits and manifestations of the concept. He’ll present several stories of how organizations successfully applied their judgment capabilities to major decisions, or turned around their overall organizational judgment. He’ll augment his presentation with video clips of several of the people and organizations involved in the research.content in here.

Competing on Analytics: How Fact-Based Decisions and Business Intelligence Drive Performance
Drawing on recent research and a host of real-life stories and applications, this talk rivets audiences with its focus on how leading firms are basing their competitive strategies on the sophisticated analysis of business data. Instead of a single application, senior executives are insisting on fact-based decisions to build broad capabilities for enterprise-level business analytics and intelligence. The most successful companies are using data and technology analytics to address the processes, skills and cultures of their organizations. Audiences leave this talk with a set of proven guidelines for how to compete in today’s marketplace on the basis of analytical prowess. Tom also offers a variety of industry-specific messages on big data and analytics, and more conceptual and “how-to-do-it” versions of his message.

Not by Brains Alone: Six Interventions for Knowledge Worker Productivity
Peter Drucker has argued that improving knowledge worker productivity is the most important task of the century. Yet most organizations simply hire smart people, and leave them alone. Few measures or management interventions exist to make such improvement possible. This talk presents six interventions for improving knowledge worker productivity, each with a set of approaches, examples, and cautions based on several research studies on how companies addressed knowledge work, both successfully and unsuccessfully. Tom’s recommendations cover the role of technology, organizational culture and behavior, as well as the physical work environment as a mechanism to enhance performance. Audiences leave this talk with a blueprint for enhancing knowledge worker productivity.

What’s the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking
There are no faddish ideas, only faddish approaches to implementing them. In this talk, based on the book by the same name, Tom presents an approach to business and management ideas that can revitalize organizations – and discusses why the adoption of these new ideas matter. He introduces a critically important role in today’s organization with respect to ideas, the idea practitioner, who selects the appropriate ideas for his or her organization, modifies them to fit, and shepherds them through implementation. And he convinces audiences that organizational leaders assume shared responsibility for instigating and managing a steady flow of new ideas. Audiences leave this talk energized by the impact that ideas can have on the morale and creativity of an organization.