3 Must Read Business Books For Data People

Sven Balnojan
5 min readJul 24, 2024
Image by Sven Balnojan.

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…

--

--

Sven Balnojan

Head of Marketing @ Arch | Data PM | “Data Mesh in Action” | Join my free data newsletters at http://thdpth.com/ and https://svenbalnojan.gumroad.com/l/oivjd