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3 Must Read Business Books For Data People
Seth Godin likes to say books are a bargain. If you get one idea from a book, it already paid for itself. I get most ideas about data science, ML and AI from business books. I don’t really know why; maybe it is the test of time, but for whatever reason, I find myself recommending more business books than data books.
So, here are three that I’ve recommended to people in the last couple of months. All of them will pay for themselves probably after you’ve read the description below ;)
When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become great at making products people will buy — A. Klement
The key idea in this book is that the alternative to any product is not what you think (like coffee and kale). However, you need to understand the alternative to build an effective product in the first place.
It is a subtle idea, but the book makes it practical. Why do I think it’s so essential to data people that I keep recommending it? Because whether you have an internal data initiative or a data-heavy product, what you’re likely to miss is the alternative! It’s such a common problem that I even wrote about “How To Estimate The Value Of Data Products.”
My thinking is this: If your product lacks a “cancel” button, the alternatives for people to cancel your product are pretty far off. They need to call or mail and sue you. But people will still buy stuff if you haven’t yet deployed your recommendation engine! People will always make decisions and take action using any kind of crutch.
Given that this is true, that the alternative for data projects is always pretty close but hard to grasp, this book is perfect for letting you wrestle with this.
The book is about the jobs-to-be-done framework and is competing with another book and a person selling a slightly different version of it. I don’t engage in the controversy. I’ve read both, and I can tell you that this one is better for data people.
Moving on to distributing your data product once you’ve built the right one!
