Many traditional businesses hate to fail. They embrace concepts such as Fail Fast in public, but deep inside their hearts, they are scared to fail. Failure is what gives corporate employees sleepless nights. In fact, many corporate initiatives fail, such as data science projects, for example. Why is failure so unloved, and what can we do about it? We have to change the way we think about failure.



Failure is not an event, it's a process.

This distinction is…

Why do we need Learning Sprints?

Virtually every company is under pressure to transform their business in order to sustain in the future. As part of these efforts, they are hiring data scientists and engineers, data analysts, and they are making huge investments into cloud, big data technologies and AI, amongst others. Virtually all employees need to unlearn what they have assumed to be true for decades, and they have to acquire new skills. Time and money are the big…

Quite often, non-technical executives have difficulties understanding what programming, on a very fundamental level, is all about. Because of that knowledge-gap, they tend to hire and overburden experienced data professionals with tasks which they are hopelessly overqualified for. Such as, for example, doing ad-hoc SQL queries on CRM data: "You're the go-to-guy for all things data, and we need the results for the board meeting tomorrow." That's a quite humbling and frustrating…

Over the last few years, Excel has been redesigned from the ground up. Currently, Microsoft is making the new Excel core-features available to every user, regardless of your Office 365 license. Thanks to the Microsoft naming conventions, it is easy to confuse the new features with existing ones. That being said, Power Query and Power Pivot are not the same things as Pivot Tables, which you have likely been using for years.…