The benefits of sharing insights

I recently joined our bi-annual senior management conference to work with my colleagues on prioritizing, mapping, and executing on our strategic vision. It was wonderful to share experiences and insights with leaders across such a broad organization. But among the exercises in strategic planning, ideation, and a host of case study reviews and business presentations, as usual my favorite and most insightful activity was the opportunity to listen to leaders from amongst our customer base. In my role, I am fortunate to engage with a number of leaders in Life Science R&D, so the opportunity to have one join our executive management conference was a great chance to have my colleagues share in these insights, and validate or challenge our own strategic vision. For a very insightful hour, we heard how a global leading pharmaceutical company addresses research needs and researcher behaviour, collects and determines 'value' for data and analytics, and foresees future directions. I won't name the person or the company, other than to say I have known him for a number of years and have found him quite visionary. But the real take home for me was the 'win-win'  where this leader was willing to invest time and share experiences so that we in turn could turn those into comparative and actionable insights which will ideally result in better data and analytics solutions for all of Life Science R&D. It's this spirit that I hope will continue to drive leadership in R&D to share their experiences with us and with the larger data community. Community direction and validation of ideas and strategy ensures that the areas where we focus on executing are the right ones; the most impactful ones.
In response to my thank you note, the speaker signed off writing "It's always good to discuss strategy and help make it real.". That is now our opportunity to address - making the value, the benefit, and the impact of this speaker (along with all the others who joined and hosted us) and this wonderful event real.