1. Sensible Organizations: Sensors, Big Data, and Quantifying the Unquantifiable

What if I told you that changing when you take a coffee break could make you more productive? Or that one of the biggest decisions a company makes revolves around the size of its lunch tables? These are things that traditional theory never looked at, indeed couldn’t look at, because there was no way to measure them.

If people have learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that using data to build organizations is better than following instinct. There is a reason the first “moneyball” team in major league baseball, the Oakland Athletics (in a now well-publicized example of data versus instinct) performed so well with a paltry budget: they used data to drive ...

Get People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.