The brain behind Lady Gaga's big data
Behind every successful man, there is supposed to be a woman. But behind every successful entertainer, you know for sure there is a genius manager. So it is with Lady Gaga. My children are "little monster" fans of the megastar, but I am absolutely in awe of her manager, Troy Carter, whose phenomenal intellect may well have made him one of our generation's great entrepreneurs.
After all, his greatest product, the singer, has been the subject of not one but two studies at Harvard Business School.
It's not just that Carter is a genius promoter; that's par for the course. It's also his ability to spot the commercial potential of an arcane if highly lucrative field of information technology: big data. This is the field that many technologists and economists such as Larry Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, believe will drive the next IT revolution.
How did he come upon this basic problem in today's IT: massive, heterogeneous and highly complex data that defy conventional methods of processing and interpretation?
As Carter explained to the , if your biggest client has more than 31 million Twitter followers and over 51 million Facebook likes - more than any person on the planet - you would naturally think about big data: Who are these people and how do you make money and promote your star out of their social media accounts?
You can see the beauty of his business logic even if you don't appreciate her music. Not bad for this self-educated, inner-city black kid and son of a single mother.