Integrate big data into business to drive competitive advantage and sustainable success Big Data MBA brings insight and expertise to leveraging big data in business so you can harness the power of analytics and gain a true business advantage. Based on a practical framework with supporting methodology and hands-on exercises, this book helps identify where and how big data can help you transform your business. You'll learn how to exploit new sources of customer, product, and operational data, coupled with advanced analytics and data science, to optimize key processes, uncover monetization opportunities, and create new sources of competitive differentiation. The discussion includes guidelines for operationalizing analytics, optimal organizational structure, and using analytic insights throughout your organization's user experience to customers and front-end employees alike. You'll learn to “think like a data scientist” as you build upon the decisions your business is trying to make, the hypotheses you need to test, and the predictions you need to produce. Business stakeholders no longer need to relinquish control of data and analytics to IT. In fact, they must champion the organization's data collection and analysis efforts. This book is a primer on the business approach to analytics, providing the practical understanding you need to convert data into opportunity. Understand where and how to leverage big data Integrate analytics into everyday operations Structure your organization to drive analytic insights Optimize processes, uncover opportunities, and stand out from the rest Help business stakeholders to “think like a data scientist” Understand appropriate business application of different analytic techniques If you want data to transform your business, you need to know how to put it to use. Big Data MBA shows you how to implement big data and analytics to make better decisions.

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming. This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming. Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games Improve collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniques Improve understanding by role-playing customer and user experiences Generate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever before Shorten meetings and make them more productive Simulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics Identify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution

Healthcare organizations and professionals have long needed a straightforward workbook to facilitate the process of root cause analysis (RCA). While other industries employ the RCA tools liberally and train facilitators thoroughly, healthcare has lagged in establishing and resourcing a quality culture. Presently, a growing number of third-party stakeholders are holding access to accreditation and reimbursement pending demonstration of a full response to events outside of expected practice. An increasing number of exceptions to healthcare practice have precipitated a strong response advocating the use of proven quality tools in the industry. In addition, the industry has now expanded its scope beyond the hospital walls to many ancillary healthcare facilities with little experience in implementing quality tools. This book responds to the demand for a RCA workbook written specifically for healthcare, yet still broad in its definition of the industry. This book contains everything that the typical RCA leader in healthcare requires: A text specific to healthcare, but using the broadest definition of the industry to include not only acute care hospitals, but rehabilitation facilities, long-term care facilities, outpatient surgery centers, ambulatory services, and general office practices. A workbook-style format that walks through the process, step-by-step. Straightforward text without “sidebars,” “tables,” and “tips.” Worksheets are provided at the end of the book to reduce reader distraction within the text. A wide range of real-world examples. Format for use by the most naive of users and most basic of processes, as well as a separate section for more advanced users or more complex issues. Templates, both print and electronic, included for the reader’s use. Ready-to-use educational materials with scripting to enable the user to train others and garner support for the use of the techniques. Background text for users in leadership to understand the tools in the larger context of healthcare improvement. Up-to-date information on the latest in the use of RCA in satisfying mandatory reporting requirements and slaying the myth that the process is onerous and fraught with barriers. Background text and tools/process are separated to facilitate the readers’ specific needs. Healthcare leaders can appreciate the current context and requirements without wading through the actual techniques; end-users can begin learning the skills without wading through dense administrative text. Language and tone promoting the use of the tools for improvement of processes that have experienced exceptions, as opposed to assigning blame for errors. Attention to process ownership, training, and resourcing. And, most importantly, thorough description of the improvement process as well as the analysis.

Fresh thinking and new insights on the nature of science in relation to faith, showing particularly that (1) true science does not need to be and in fact is not hostile to religious faith, and (2) evangelical Christians in general need not be either fearful of nor hostile toward scientific endeavor.

A guide to product management exploring the best practices: identifying the impact-driven product, planning for success, setting up and measuring time-bound metrics, and developing a lean product roadmap. Key Features Identifying Impact-Driven Products Investing in Key Business Outcomes Value mapping to maintain a lean product backlog Utilizing time-bound product metrics Eliminating process waste Book Description Lean Product Management is about finding the smartest way to build an Impact Driven Product that can deliver value to customers and meet business outcomes when operating under internal and external constraints. Author, Mangalam Nandakumar, is a product management expert, with over 17 years of experience in the field. Businesses today are competing to innovate. Cost is no longer the constraint, execution is. It is essential for any business to harness whatever competitive advantage they can, and it is absolutely vital to deliver the best customer experience possible. The opportunities for creating impact are there, but product managers have to improvise on their strategy every day in order to capitalize on them. This is the Agile battleground, where you need to stay Lean and be able to respond to abstract feedback from an ever shifting market. This is where Lean Product Management will help you thrive. Lean Product Management is an essential guide for product managers, and to anyone embarking on a new product development. Mangalam Nandakumar will help you to align your product strategy with business outcomes and customer impact. She introduces the concept of investing in Key Business Outcomes as part of the product strategy in order to provide an objective metric about which product idea and strategy to pursue. You will learn how to create impactful end-to-end product experiences by engaging stakeholders and reacting to external feedback. What you will learn How do you execute ideas that matter? How can you define the right success metrics? How can you plan for product success? How do you capture qualitative and quantitative insights about the product? How do you know whether your product aligns to desired business goals? What processes are slowing you down? Who this book is for If you are leading a team that is building a new product, then this book is for you. The book is targeted at product managers, functional leads in enterprises, business sponsors venturing into new product offerings, product development teams, and start-up founders.

Are you struggling to do the things you know are important because of how annoying or uninteresting they are? Are you frustrated by the lack of hours in the day? Do you wish you could dictate your schedule instead of just letting things happen and hoping for the best? Once you understand how you are currently spending your time and why, you'll be able to take control of what you accomplish every day and ensure that your actions tie back to your most important values and life priorities. How is this possible? By constructing your very own effort matrix. The effort matrix depicts where your activities lie in the context of importance and interest: 1. Gung-Ho (we love this part of our lives) 2. Grind (things that are vitally important and we know we must do) 3. Guilty Pleasure (fun stuff) 4. Screw It (not worth the effort) Spending your time on activities of high importance and high interest makes you happier. Shifting high-value activities into a place of high importance and high interest makes you more productive. In The Effort Matrix, you will learn how to do this. We'll help you define your high-value activities that tie back to your top priorities, make time every day for them, craft a bulletproof to-do list system that prioritizes itself, and build productivity routines that maximize your efforts throughout the week. Stop wasting time on the things that don't matter and wondering why nothing ever gets done. To live a productive life, we can follow all kinds of guidelines, tools, and rules but we will only be successful if we harness our efforts! This book explores where most people fall short on productivity because of the unwillingness to put effort into the right things. Understand your effort matrix and follow the simple guidelines in this book and you'll become more productive and happier at the same time.