Our three words for 2020

New Year, New You. Right? It’s the time for fresh starts and promises to be better. A smarter way to approach the new year, especially for a marketing analytics company, is not with resolutions but with words – three to be exact. Chris Brogan started this exercise back in 2006 and, for Trust Insights, it makes a lot more logical sense than trying to overhaul who we are and then forget about it after 30 days. The three words are to be used as a guidepost for the year ahead. Co-founder Chris Penn participates in this exercise every year as well. You can read about his three words here: https://www.christopherspenn.com/2020/01/my-three-words-for-2020/

For Trust Insights we chose these three words to guide us in 2020: Grow, Challenge, Focus

Grow: We want to grow our business in terms of revenue but more importantly, we want to grow in knowledge, skill sets, and valuable contributions. We were hotly debating this morning the topic of diversity, bias, and racism. We want to make sure we’re not avoiding difficult conversations with each other – by engaging in respectful debates, we allow ourselves to grow and learn as humans. We gain better insights and understanding of the data we collect. by growing intellectually, we can be a better company, offer better services, and be better as leaders.

Challenge: We want to take on new challenges as a company, face challenges head-on, and challenge people to use their data to make informed decisions. Taking on new challenges means that we take ourselves out of our comfort zones, avoiding complacency. We never want to settle, we want to keep pushing for more. This allows us to keep growing (see the word above). We want to face challenges head-on. Something that we won’t tolerate at Trust Insights is passive-aggressive behavior and shying away from uncomfortable situations. There are productive ways to tackle issues, and Trust Insights will strive to continue to deal with issues directly. Most importantly, we want to continue to challenge people to raise the bar and use their data to make insightful decisions. All too often we see that data that has been painstakingly collected sits around and goes unanalyzed. Decision are made, results are not great, goals aren’t met. Lather, rinse, repeat. Data doesn’t have to be daunting or overwhelming. As leaders and teachers, our challenge is to show people how to get starting in small ways that make a big impact, and to ask them to be consistent in their efforts.

Focus: We are the first ones to admit that we have shiny object syndrome. When we took a look back at what we accomplished over the past year it was a lot. But – there were a lot of half-baked and abandoned projects. Why? We got distracted by something else that was more interesting, or a new project came up, or someone asked a question that took us off the task, or we forgot to document, or set up a reminder, or…the list of reasons keeps going. Even as I write this post my attention keeps getting drawn away into other things. We, all of us at Trust Insights, have committed to applying more focus and follow-through, and hold each other accountable to finish what we started. Additionally, we’re working on focusing on who we are externally. We realize that how we message ourselves could be more clear and we’re taking steps to focus on what we do best: marketing analytics. How we do these things, artificial intelligence and machine learning, are important but not the foot we need to lead with. We want to make sure it’s easy for people to understand what we do and how we can provide value to them.

Want to join the conversation? Reach out to @trustinsights on Twitter and let us know what your three words for 2020 are.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.