Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

Why Everyone Needs Analytical Skills

Welcome to the age of data. No matter your interests (sports, movies, politics), your industry (finance, marketing, technology, manufacturing), or the type of organization you work for (big company, nonprofit, small start-up)—your world is awash with data.

As a successful manager today, you must be able to make sense of all this information. You need to be conversant with analytical terminology and methods and able to work with quantitative information. This book promises to become your “quantitative literacy" guide—helping you develop the analytical skills you need right now in order to summarize data, find the meaning in it, and extract its value.

In Keeping Up with the Quants, authors, professors, and analytics experts Thomas Davenport and Jinho Kim offer practical tools to improve your understanding of data analytics and enhance your thinking and decision making. You’ll gain crucial skills, including:

• How to formulate a hypothesis
• How to gather and analyze relevant data
• How to interpret and communicate analytical results
• How to develop habits of quantitative thinking
• How to deal effectively with the “quants” in your organization

Big data and the analytics based on it promise to change virtually every industry and business function over the next decade. If you don’t have a business degree or if you aren’t comfortable with statistics and quantitative methods, this book is for you. Keeping Up with the Quants will give you the skills you need to master this new challenge—and gain a significant competitive edge.

• Competing on Analytics: Updated, with a New Introduction: The New Science of Winning
• Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight
• Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions
• Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart
• R in Action: Data Analysis and Graphics with R
• Big Data in Practice: How 45 Successful Companies Used Big Data Analytics to Deliver Extraordinary Results
• HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers (HBR Guide Series)
• Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results
• Analytics: The Agile Way (Wiley and SAS Business Series)
• Learning R: A Step-by-Step Function Guide to Data Analysis