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.

Tom Davenport is the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He teaches analytics/big data in executive programs at Babson, Harvard Business School and School of Public Health, and MIT Sloan School.

Davenport pioneered the concept of competing on analytics with his best-selling 2006 Harvard Business Review article and 2007 book. His most recent book is The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work. He wrote or edited nineteen other books and over 200 articles for Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, The Financial Times, and many other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. He has been named one of the top 25 consultants by Consulting News, one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry by Ziff-Davis, and one of the world's top fifty business school professors by Fortune magazine.

Source: Babson College