Pedro Pinto's Reviews > Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An absolute MUST READ for everyone that has to convey information and to make it actionable.

If you want to improve your competences to disclose data and turn into information and actionable insights, you cannot miss this book, that take you in a journey on how to improve your "game".

The gold nuggets I took for myself while reading this book are the following:
1. The need to clearly segregate the exploratory phase from the explanatory phase of your work (simple but very insightful for me).
2. Clearly know before you start the variables and features that should be taken into consideration, knowing that you key goal is the action you want to promote or insights you want to convey.
3. the pivotal importance to choose the correct visual representation to convey your message~.
4. promote the usage of graphs (always go for the visual system of your audience vs. verbal system)
5. clutter in your presentation is your worst enemy
6.focus the attention of your audience attention by using the 3 types of memory (Iconic, Short, and Log-term) and by deploying preattentive visual attributes on text and graphs
7. use key concepts of design (affordance, accessibility, aesthetics, acceptance) in order to improve the chances to achieve your goals.
8. should actively manage the: graph choices, data order, understand where the audience eyes are drawn to, usage of strategies to emphasize and de-emphasize components, usage of color, thickness and size, alignment and position, titling and annotation.
9. know and use the key characteristics of a good story and it is structured and make it as clear as possible - horizontal and vertical logic.

My highlighted quotes:
1. "...Being able to visualize data and tell stories with it is key to turning it into information that can be used to drive better decision making..."
2. "...An effective data visualization can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to communicating the findings of your study, raising money for your nonprofit, presenting to your board, or simply getting your point across to your audience. ..."
3. "...Those hired into analytical roles typically have quantitative backgrounds that suit them well for the other steps (finding the data, pulling it together, analyzing it, building models), but not necessarily any formal training in design to help them when it comes to the communication of the analysis—which, by the way, is typically the only part of the analytical process that your audience ever sees. ..."
4."...Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others ..."
5. "...explanatory (taking the time to turn the data into information that can be consumed by an audience: the two pearls)..."
6. "...You should always want your audience to know or do something..."
7. "...The storyboard establishes a structure for your communication. It is a visual outline of the content you plan to create. ..."
8. "...To reduce this mental processing, we can use color saturation to provide visual cues, helping our eyes and brains more quickly target the potential points of interest. ..."
9. "...graphs interact with our visual system, which is faster at processing information. ..."
10. "...you should avoid: pie charts, donut charts, 3D, and secondary y-axes..."
11. "...every single element you add to that page or screen takes up cognitive load on the part of your audience—in other words, takes them brain power to process. ..."
12. "...In general, identify anything that isn’t adding informative value—or isn’t adding enough informative value to make up for its presence—and remove those things. Identifying and eliminating such clutter is the focus of this chapter. ..."
13. "... “there is still some space left on that page, so let’s add something there,” or worse, “there is still some space left on that page, so let’s add more data.” No! Never add data just for the sake of adding data—only add data with a thoughtful and specific purpose in mind! ..."
14. "...Without other visual cues, most members of your audience will start at the top left of your visual or slide and scan with their eyes in zigzag motions across the screen or page. ..."
15. "...Form follows function [...] we first want to think about what it is we want our audience to be able to do with the data (function) and then create a visualization (form) that will allow for this with ease. ..."
16."... “You know you’ve achieved perfection, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing to take away” (Saint-Exupery, 1943). ..."
17. "...In data visualization—and communicating with data in general—spending time to make our designs aesthetically pleasing can mean our audience will have more patience with our visuals, increasing our chance of success for getting our message across. ..."
18. "...A good story grabs your attention and takes you on a journey, evoking an emotional response..."
19. "...two ways to persuade people: The first is conventional rhetoric[...] It’s an intellectual process. But it is problematic, because while you’re trying to persuade your audience, they are arguing with you in their heads. [...] The second way to persuade, according to McKee, is through story. Stories unite an idea with an emotion, arousing the audience’s attention and energy. Because it requires creativity, telling a compelling story is harder than conventional rhetoric. ..."
20. "...Keep it simple. Edit ruthlessly. Be authentic. Don’t communicate for yourself—communicate for your audience. ..."
21. "...The more the information is repeated or used, the more likely it is to eventually end up in long-term memory, or to be retained..."
22. "...The idea behind horizontal logic is that you can read just the slide title of each slide throughout your deck and, together, these snippets tell the overarching story you want to communicate..."
23. "...Vertical logic means that all information on a given slide is self-reinforcing...."

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Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters - Review

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard P. Rumelt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It has been a while since I read a strategy book, a topic I have always liked but the last books/articles i have read felt they did not add that much.

However, I have seen this book recommend several times by different persons/authors and reluctantly decided to give it a try (must confess i bought the book more than 1 year ago ...) and i did not regret any single page.

This book is one of the best i have read on this subject and strongly recommend it to all that are interested on the topic. It helps that i agree with the vision that the author has on what is strategy and how one should approach and deploy it.

It was really close to my heart the following key messages:

1. the relevance of having a good STRATEGY (having into consideration how often we see the absence of strategy or even worst bad strategy in several organizations)

2. the concept of sources of power that underpin your strategy (leverage, proximate objectives, chain-link systems, using design, focus, growth, using dynamics, inertia and entropy)

3. the kernel of good strategy - 1. Establish a correct diagnosis; 2. Define a clear guiding policy; 3. Deploy coherent actions

4. Think strategy like a science - Observe, raise the relevant Questions; generate alternative hypothesis; run Experiment; analyze and draw conclusions and, Report conclusion and act upon them.

My highlighted quotes from the book (24!):

1. "...A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect. ..."

2. "... A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance. ..."

3."...If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen. ..."

4. "...Business leaders know their organizations should have a strategy. Yet many express frustration with the whole process of strategic planning. The reason for this dissatisfaction is that most corporate strategic plans are simply three-year or five-year rolling budgets combined with market share projections. Calling a rolling budget of this type a “strategic plan” gives people false expectations that the exercise will somehow result in a coherent strategy. ..."

5."...You can call these annual exercises “strategic planning” if you like, but they are not strategy. They cannot deliver what senior managers want: a pathway to substantially higher performance. To obtain higher performance, leaders must identify the critical obstacles to forward progress and then develop a coherent approach to overcoming them. This may require product innovation, or new approaches to distribution, or a change in organizational structure. Or it may exploit insights into the implications of changes in the environment—in technology, consumer tastes, laws, resource prices, or competitive behavior. ..."

6. "...To help clarify this distinction it is helpful to use the word “goal” to express overall values and desires and to use the word “objective” to denote specific operational targets. ..."

7. "... A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. ..."

8. "... When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance. ..."

9. "... The core content of a strategy is a diagnosis of the situation at hand, the creation or identification of a guiding policy for dealing with the critical difficulties, and a set of coherent actions. ..."

10. "...Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it. ..."

11. "...A guiding policy creates advantage by anticipating the actions and reactions of others, by reducing the complexity and ambiguity in the situation, by exploiting the leverage inherent in concentrating effort on a pivotal or decisive aspect of the situation, and by creating policies and actions that are coherent, each building on the other rather than canceling one another out. ..."

12. "...Strategy is about action, about doing something. The kernel of a strategy must contain action. It does not need to point to all the actions that will be taken as events unfold, but there must be enough clarity about action to bring concepts down to earth. ..."

13. “Without action, the world would still be an idea.”

14. "... That is, the resource deployments, policies, and maneuvers that are undertaken should be consistent and coordinated. The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy. ..."

15. "... agents. Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherence imposed on a system by policy and design. More specifically, design is the engineering of fit among parts, specifying how actions and resources will be combined. ..."

16. "... In very general terms, a good strategy works by harnessing power and applying it where it will have the greatest effect. In the short term, this may mean attacking a problem or rival with adroit combinations of policy, actions, and resources. In the longer term, it may involve cleverly using policies and resource commitments to develop capabilities that will be of value in future contests. ..."

17. "... In competitive strategy, the key anticipations are often of buyer demand and competitive reactions. ..."

18."... The basic definition of competitive advantage is straightforward. If your business can produce at a lower cost than can competitors, or if it can deliver more perceived value than can competitors, or a mix of the two, then you have a competitive advantage. ..."

19. "... One must reexamine each aspect of product and process, casting aside the comfortable assumption that everyone knows what they are doing. Today, this approach to information flows and business processes is sometimes called “reengineering” or “business-process transformation.” Whatever it is called, the underlying principle is that improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives. ..."

20. "... During the relatively stable periods between episodic transitions, it is difficult for followers to catch the leader, just as it is difficult for one of the two or three leaders to pull far ahead of the others. But in moments of transition, the old pecking order of competitors may be upset and a new order becomes possible. ..."

21. "... Fortunately, a leader does not need to get it totally right—the organization’s strategy merely has to be more right than those of its rivals. ..."

22. "... This property of mass—resistance to a change in motion—is inertia. In business, inertia is an organization’s unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing circumstances. ..."

23. "...entropy measures a physical system’s degree of disorder, and the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases in an isolated physical system. Similarly, weakly managed organizations tend to become less organized and focused. ..."

24. "... Similarly, one can sense a business firm that has not been carefully managed. Its product line grows less focused; prices are set low to please the sales department, and shipping schedules are too long, pleasing only the factory. ..."

Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. Profile. Kindle Edition.


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A Modern Detective by Edgar Allan Poe - Review

A Modern Detective by Edgar Allan Poe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2 simple stories whereby the main character (Auguste Dupin) due to its outstanding analytical capabilities is able to decipher & solve two unexplainable murders using his deductive capabilities based on the information he is able to see or read from the newspaper.

Good reading, short stories (bog plus) ...but not much more than that. Personally, must confess that learnt new vocabulary (not so often seen and used nowadays) and the only caveat is that most of it probably will forget due to the lack of its usage in my current readings.

A couple of quotes that caught my eye:

1. "... the analyst [...] is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural..."

2."...The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study and especially by the highest branch of it [...]has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. ..."

3. "... the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation..."

4. "... ¡The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis. ..."

5. "...the ingenious are always fanciful and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytical..."

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