Be a Data-Driven Manager

Awesome article in today's New York Times:

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

The article is about how firms --- faced with mounds and mounds of data --- now find they need people who know how to organize and analyze it. If you have the skills to answer real-world questions using real-world data, you're going to do well.

But getting those skills requires you to do some serious book learnin'. Econometrics and statistics are tricky stuff, and it's easy to make big mistakes.

This is, I think, one reason why the overall rates of graduate school attendance have been rising. The world is an increasingly complicated place, and so there are a lot of valuable, real world skills that are so complicated that you really need a college degree before you can even start to study them carefully. And you need enough experience with the world to see how you'd use the skills, so you can appreciate the relevance.

This is great (for me) because I've been trying to move my MBA classes this direction anyway. So, I'll invite first-year MBA students to ask me how one would use data to answer the questions that come up in class. I'll try to have answers for you.