Anti-patterns in Enterprise Data Sciences

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book "The Bed of Procrustes" noted that "people focus on role models; it is more effective to find anti-models -- people you don't want to resemble when you grow up." While Taleb's quote is commonly referenced across journalism and social media today, it isn't as applicable to real life as we might think -- at least not to real business life. Rather than seeking out contrarian voices, industry leaders tend to be overly influenced by mainstream thinking. Consider all the searches for those SEO-optimized webpages that perennially comprise page-one search results, reinforcing the same timeworn, made-for-PowerPoint sets of ideas over and over again. "Establish a data lake," they instruct business users. It is staggering to consider the number of companies fundamentally built on such "best practices", their leaders devoutly believing that in doing so they will roll out inevitably trend-setting products and features and win the battle for customers. Thinking in the fields of Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been no different. In fact, "machine learning" has been the poster child of enterprise success stories for the last decade.