Aaron U. Bolin, Ph.D.

Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Robert Morrison (list price: $29.95; 2010 Harvard Business School Publishing). Analytics at Work  is billed as a how to guide for managers to "effectively deploy analytics in their day-to-day" operations (from the inside cover). Though I enjoyed the book, I don't believe that a reasonable person could say that it lives up to the promise. Instead, Davenport and his co-authors provide a very general framework that lacks the advertised day-to-day details required for deployment. I found the book to be interesting and quite useful from a "oh, I hadn't thought of that..." perspective. However, I'm not sure that there is much original material here beyond the general framework -- most of which was presented in an earlier work by the same authors. Though I wouldn't recommend this book for serious analytic how-to, it would be a good read for someone seeking a gen...

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte (list price: $34.99; O'Reilly Media, Inc.) slide:ology is designed as a reasonably comprehensive how-to guide on creating compelling visual material for presentations, promotional materials, and stories. The book is an easy read and visually very appealing. With a list price of $34.99, I found the book to be a very affordable introduction to the world of the graphic designer. I bought the book at a time when I was struggling to depict a very technically complex manpower planning system in a way that was intuitively understandable. As I worked through the illustrated 260 page volume, I found myself nodding my head throughout. That is, Duarte's expertise shines through as she provides a very good basic structure for presentation design. This book was useful to me in my work; I incorporated some of her recommendations into the presentation that I was building. From a critical perspective, I can...