Data/Big Data

Columbia Business School Professors Oded Netzer, Christopher J. Frank and Paul F. Magnone delve into the ideas and practical applications detailed in their new book Decisions Over Decimals.

My key takeaways from this episode:

What should listeners know about understanding data

• Today data accessibility is more available, the tooling to analyse data is cheaper, and it’s expected of leaders that they make data-informed decisions.
• Yet, although most things are measured, many things are not improved. The challenge is not the data, it’s the decision-making.
• You can torture data enough to get them to admit to anything. The question is how to interpret data correctly and how to factor in human interpretation.

Become a confident leader and use data, experience, and intuition to drive your decisions

Agile decision making is imperative as you lead in a data-driven world. Amid streams of data and countless meetings, we make hasty decisions, slow decisions, and often no decisions. 

Uniquely bridging theory and practice, Decisions Over Decimals breaks this pattern by uniting data intelligence with human judgment to get to action — a sharp approach the authors refer to as Quantitative Intuition (QI). 

A new book argues the best decision makers combine good data with their own good judgment.

In this episode, Alan and Oded discuss “Decisions Over Decimals,” Oded’s latest co-authored book with Christopher Frank, Vice President of the Global Advertising and Brand Management team at American Express, and Paul Magnone, Head of Global Strategic Alliances at Google, who are also professors at Columbia. Having worked on the front lines and taught future executives, they identified two data myths that served as the inspiration for this book.