Over the past few months, I've been gathering practical, hands-on resources for quantitative analysis. You would think this would be easy, but it's been quite challenging to find books or software that are detailed enough to be meaningful and informative, yet not so detailed as to be a) over my head or b) overkill.

As a design strategist, I don't need the kind of precision or technical detail that, say, an engineer, physicist, or econometrician would demand. I just need good tools for back-of-the-envelope analysis that will help our design team become directionally correct. Turning Numbers Into Knowledge is, so far, the closest thing I've found to such a book. While not precisely what I was expecting, it was an exceedingly good read and will most certainly have a place on my shelf for a long time to come.

From the book's website:

Turning Numbers into Knowledge teaches you (in a non-technical way) the art of using numbers for practical problem solving, revealing tools, tricks, and heretofore unwritten rules that the best real-world problem solvers know by heart. Everyone, from journalists to researchers, academics to activists, and CEOs to government officials, will glean something useful from this book. If you need to understand numbers produced by others, if you supervise people creating such analyses, or if you're generating numbers yourself, you need this book!

So, what exactly is in the book? Think of it as halfway in between Super Crunchers andAnalyzing Business Data With Excel. The book is divided into 40 chapters, each about 2-7 pages long and focused on a specific topic, yet unified by the common theme of critical thinking about using quantitative information.

For example, chapter 27 is "Dig Into the Numbers," and one of my favorites. It offers general guidelines on how to clean data to ensure that it's valid, check relationships between the data to make sure it's internally consistent, and most notably, how to normalize it to make comparisons easier. It brings the guidelines home by creating a few charts that explore the relationships between US GDP, population, and steel production, as well as a model that explains the differences in the share prices of Google and GE.

However, the majority of the book is essentially just a playbook for critical thinking. The best way to sum up the book is by listing the suggestions in the closing chapter:

• Don't be intimidated by anyone
• Be a critical thinker
• Don't confuse what's countable with what really counts
• Get organized
• Question authority
• Dig into the numbers
• Focus on the essential
• Document, document, document
• Use the Internet
• Remember that others don't care about your work as much as you do
• Synthesis follows analysis

As you might see from the above list, what's not in this book is lists of formulas, ratios, tutorials on software, or other super detailed, technical information. That's kind of what I was expecting from it, but in retrospect, this information is far more valuable. You can get the rest from a statistics, management science, or math textbook, and it's not that hard to learn how to "plug and chug." What's hard to learn is how to see the relationships, and how to turn the numbers into meaningful knowledge.

If it's not obvious by now, I highly recommend this book to just about anybody. It seems particularly valuable to people who, like me, have some intermediate knowledge of quantitative analysis, but could use tips on how to apply it. But really, it's for anybody who needs to think critically, and that set includes everybody on the face of the planet.

Official website
Amazon