Informed Success: A Bibliography for Student Entrepreneurs

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup--practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn't cover, based on his popular ben's blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he's gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Learn how big data and other sources of information can be transformed into valuable knowledge -- knowledge that can create incredible competitive advantage to propel a business toward market leadership. Learn through examples and experience exactly how to pick projects and build analytics teams that deliver results. Know the ethical and privacy issues, and apply the three-part litmus test of context, permission, and accuracy. Without a doubt, data and analytics are the new source of competitive advantage, but how do executives go from hype to action? Thats the objective of this book -- to assist executives in making the right investments in the right place and at the right time in order to reap the full benefits of data analytics.

Prescriptive analytics is more directly linked to successful decision-making than any other form of business analytics. It can help you systematically sort through your choices to optimise decisions, respond to new opportunities and risks with precision, and continually reflect new information into your decisioning process. In "Prescriptive Analytics", analytics expert Dr. Dursun Delen illuminates the field's state-of-the-art methods, offering holistic insight for both professionals and students. Delen's end-to-end, all-inclusive approach covers optimisation, simulation, multi-criteria decision-making methods, inference- and heuristic-based decisioning, and more. Balancing theory and practice, he presents intuitive conceptual illustrations, realistic example problems, and real-world case studies-all designed to deliver knowledge you can use.

* Discover where prescriptive analytics fits and how it improves decision-making Identify optimal solutions for achieving an objective within real-world constraints
* Analyse complex systems via Monte-Carlo, discrete, and continuous simulations
* Apply powerful multi-criteria decision-making and mature expert systems and case-based reasoning
* Preview emerging techniques based on deep learning and cognitive computing

The New Edition of a Business Classic This landmark work, the first to introduce business leaders to analytics, reveals how analytics are rewriting the rules of competition. Updated with fresh content, "Competing on Analytics" provides the road map for becoming an analytical competitor, showing readers how to create new strategies for their organizations based on sophisticated analytics. Introducing a five-stage model of analytical competition, Davenport and Harris describe the typical behaviors, capabilities, and challenges of each stage. They explain how to assess your company's capabilities and guide it toward the highest level of competition. With equal emphasis on two key resources, human and technological, this book reveals how even the most highly analytical companies can up their game. With an emphasis on predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous analytics for marketing, supply chain, finance, M&A, operations, R&D, and HR, the book contains numerous new examples from different industries and business functions, such as Disney's vacation experience, Google's HR, UPS's logistics, the Chicago Cubs' training methods, and Firewire Surfboards' customization.

Additional new topics and research include:
* Data scientists and what they do
* Big data and the changes it has wrought Hadoop and other open-source software for managing and analyzing data
* Data products--new products and services based on data and analytics
* Machine learning and other AI technologies
* The Internet of Things and its implications
* New computing architectures, including cloud computing
* Embedding analytics within operational systems
* Visual analytics

The business classic that turned a generation of leaders into analytical competitors, "Competing on Analytics" is the definitive guide for transforming your company's fortunes in the age of analytics and big data.

"Evidence-Based Decision-Making: How to Leverage Available Data & Avoid Cognitive Biases" examines how a wide range of factual evidence, primarily derived from a variety of data available to organizations, can be used to improve the quality of business decision-making, by helping decision makers circumvent the various cognitive biases that adversely impact how we all think.

The book is built on the following premise: During the past decade, the new 'data world' emerged, in which the rush to develop competencies around business analytics and data science can be characterized as nothing less than the new commercial arms race. The ever-expanding volume and variety of data are well known, as are the great advances in data processing/analytics, data visualization and related information production-focused capabilities. Yet comparatively little effort has been devoted to how the informational products of business analytics and data science are 'consumed', or used in the organizational decision-making processes, as the available, well, evidence shows that only some of that information is used to drive some business decisions some of the time.

Evidence-Based Decision-Making details an explicit process describing how the universe of available and applicable evidence, which includes organizational and other data, industry benchmarks, scientific studies and professional experience, can be assessed, amalgamated and funnel into an objective driver of key business decisions.

Introducing key concepts in relation to data and evidence, history of evidence-based management, this new and extremely topical book will be essential reading for researchers and students of Data Analytics as well as those working in the private and public sectors, and in the voluntary sector.

To help future managers use and understand analytics, Business Intelligence provides readers with a solid foundation of BI that is reinforced with hands-on practice.

KEY TOPICS: Introduction to Business Intelligence; Data Warehousing; Business Performance Management; Data Mining for Business Intelligence; Text and Web Mining; Business Intelligence Implementation, Integration and Emerging Trends

Learn why bad decisions happen to good managers--and how to make better ones. If you read nothing else on decision making, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you and your organization make better choices and avoid common traps. Leading experts such as Ram Charan, Michael Mankins, and Thomas Davenport provide the insights and advice you need to: Make bold decisions that challenge the status quo Support your decisions with diverse data Evaluate risks and benefits with equal rigor Check for faulty cause-and-effect reasoning Test your decisions with experiments Foster and address constructive criticism Defeat indecisiveness with clear accountability

Decisions in businesses and organizations are too often based on fads, fashions and the success stories of famous CEOs. At the same time, traditional models and new cutting-edge solutions often fail to deliver on what they promise. This situation leaves managers, business leaders, consultants and policymakers with a profound challenge: how can we stay away from trends and quick fixes, and instead use valid and reliable evidence to support the organization?

In response to this problem, evidence-based management has evolved with the goal of improving the quality of decision-making by using critically evaluated evidence from multiple sources - organizational data, professional expertise, stakeholder values and scientific literature. This book sets out and explains the specific skills needed to gather, understand and use evidence to make better-informed organizational decisions.

"Evidence-Based Management" is a comprehensive guide that provides current and future managers, consultants and organizational leaders with the knowledge and practical skills to improve the quality and outcome of their decision-making. Online resources include case studies, exercises, lecture slides and further reading.

Don't let a fear of numbers hold you back. Today's business environment brings with it an onslaught of data. Now more than ever, managers must know how to tease insight from data--to understand where the numbers come from, make sense of them, and use them to inform tough decisions. How do you get started? Whether you're working with data experts or running your own tests, you'll find answers in the "HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers." This book describes three key steps in the data analysis process, so you can get the information you need, study the data, and communicate your findings to others.

You'll learn how to:
* Identify the metrics you need to measure
* Run experiments and A/B tests
* Ask the right questions of your data experts
* Understand statistical terms and concepts
* Create effective charts and visualizations
* Avoid common mistakes

Written by renowned data science experts Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett, "Data Science for Business" introduces the fundamental principles of data science, and walks you through the "data-analytic thinking" necessary for extracting useful knowledge and business value from the data you collect. This guide also helps you understand the many data-mining techniques in use today. Based on an MBA course Provost has taught at New York University over the past ten years, "Data Science for Business" provides examples of real-world business problems to illustrate these principles. You'll not only learn how to improve communication between business stakeholders and data scientists, but also how participate intelligently in your company's data science projects. You'll also discover how to think data-analytically, and fully appreciate how data science methods can support business decision-making.

* Understand how data science fits in your organization--and how you can use it for competitive advantage
* Treat data as a business asset that requires careful investment if you're to gain real value * Approach business problems data-analytically, using the data-mining process to gather good data in the most appropriate way
* Learn general concepts for actually extracting knowledge from data
* Apply data science principles when interviewing data science job candidates

Wall Street Journal Bestseller New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath explores how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?

"Upstream" probes the psychological forces that push us downstream--including "problem blindness," which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out--as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation's culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge--and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas.

"Upstream" delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we've forgotten that we can fix them?

Every day we make choices--about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children's health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. "Nudge "is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein show that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. But by knowing how people think, we can use sensible "choice architecture" to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.

What's the best way to change your life? Change how you think, says marketing guru Gerald Zaltman. While most of us are accustomed to self-improvement via physical exercise or dieting, we often overlook our most powerful tool for effecting change: our own thoughts. Through a variety of exercises called Think Keys, Zaltman guides the reader through the mind's most important unconscious and conscious dynamics. Zaltman has used these techniques with executives from around the world and at the Harvard Business School to teach people how to think better. Now he brings his time-tested toolbox to all readers who have an interest in unlocking their own potential. With insightful observations, thought-provoking questions, and curiosity-stoking content, "Unlocked" is the go-to 2018 book that is certain to change your life.

You may not realize it but simple, irrelevant factors can have profound consequences on your decisions and behavior, often diverting you from your original plans and desires. "Sidetracked" will help you identify and avoid these influences so the decisions you make do stick--and you finally reach your intended goals. Psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino has long studied the factors at play when judgment and decision making collide with the results of our choices in real life. In this book she explores inconsistent decisions played out in a wide range of circumstances--from our roles as consumers and employees (what we buy, how we manage others) to the choices that we make more broadly as human beings (who we date, how we deal with friendships). From Gino's research, we see when a mismatch is most likely to occur between what we want and what we end up doing. What factors are likely to sway our decisions in directions we did not initially consider? And what can we do to correct for the subtle influences that derail our decisions? The answers to these and similar questions will help you negotiate similar factors when faced with them in the real world.

For fans of Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman, this book will help you better understand the nuances of your decisions and how they get derailed--so you have more control over keeping them on track.

Every day people make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Iyengar's award-winning research reveals that the reasons for people's choices are surprising and profound.