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

Thomas H. Davenport · Jinho Kim

May 2013 · Harvard Business Press

About this eBook

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.

About the author

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Chair at Babson College and a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business. He is also a senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics and the cofounder and research director of the International Institute for Analytics. Davenport is the coauthor of Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work. This is the seventeenth book he has authored, coauthored, or edited.

Jinho Kim is a professor of business and statistics at the Korea National Defense University and the research director of the KNDU Lab for Analytics Research. He holds a PhD from the Wharton School and is the author of six books published in Korea, including the bestselling 100 Common Senses in Statistics and Freak Statistics. He has developed and run an educational program for building individuals’ analytical skills. His current research focuses on the use of analytical methods to address various issues in business and society.