Business Savvy

Business Savvy

Critical business thinking, a required course in most accredited university commerce programs, teaches one to evaluate evidence instead of simply accepting it. Dyer proposes six criteria that, ideally, must be satisfied to consider evidence credible: sufficiency, precision, accuracy, authoritativeness, representativeness and clarity of expression.

Sufficiency simply refers to whether the author of a given affirmation has provided enough evidence to support his or her assertion, the amount required may vary depending on the claim’s contestability and on its implications (i.e. a contention potentially serving as the basis for implementing a new policy necessitates substantially more justification than a benign statement aimed not to influence any outcomes, but merely to describe).

In this context, precision refers to the use of statistics, exact numbers and dates, and direct quotes. Saying that hundreds of students smoke on a daily basis sounds different than stating that out of 320 students surveyed, 210 admitted to consistently smoking at least one cigarette during a period of 24 hours (imaginary data, to illustrate). However, one must be cautious because there is the trap of over-precision, emphasizing that a wild-type mouse measures exactly 9.53827366432 centimeters (3.75522597226 inches) from head to tail is probably uncalled for, unless of course, the matter has to do with some growth hormone experiment where the measure is crucial.

Accuracy often gets confused with precision, which is to be expected since most of these categories lack unambiguous separations between them. Evaluating whether a claim is accurate can be a daunting task, but is made easier by relying on the other five concepts.

Business Savvy Gun. I firmly believe that success lies in the combination of both talent and business savvy, and that the magic comes through partnership between both. (Delphine Arnault). Photo by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

As international students wishing to perfect their second language know, in grammar and syntax, it is often the case that a rule has an exception, so it is important to avoid absolute rigidity. For instance, in a paper on organizational structure, Greiner (1998) asserts that companies’ evolution and growth happens in stages, that each phase culminates in a crisis, and that it is this disruption (or the successful resolution thereof) that leads the firm to the next step. Further, companies that fail to resolve the turbulences, usually by lack of flexibility, by failure to change and adapt, either fail to grow or cease to exist altogether.

In the article, the author presents little undiluted supporting evidence of the claims presented, but they are nonetheless judged as trustworthy for the following several reasons. First and foremost, the work was published in a highly respected academic journal, thus a reader may instantly assume that the publication ascertains quality. Second, the author is an accomplished professor and an expert in the field. Third, the arguments do flow logically and one can recognize how the points are arrived at. Consequently, despite the fact that pretty much only the authoritativeness criterion is satisfied, the source and theory are deemed credible.

Finally, representativeness is simpler to grasp if one contemplates statistical methods. From analyzing statistics, one comprehends that it would be wrong to generalize to a whole population based on a biased, too small, or unrepresentative sample. While the last but not least item, clarity of expression, speaks for itself.