Pharmaceutical Management Science Association

Below are book recommendations from PMSA members:



Healthcare Relationship Marketing
Ira J. Haimowitz
This is a practical overview and resource guide for the design and measurement of pharmaceutical relationship marketing (RM) programs. It contains descriptions of each aspect of pharmaceutical RM design and measurement, including a running case study with follow-up exercises. The author has also conducted interviews from several pharmaceutical marketing industry experts, each having at least 15 years of working healthcare RM knowledge, and each speaking on their specific specialities within pharmaceutical relationship marketing.

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Predictably Irrational
Dan Ariely
Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? The answers will surprise you. Predictably Irrational is an intriguing, witty and utterly original look at why we all make illogical decisions. Why can a 50p aspirin do what a 5p aspirin can't? If an item is "free" it must be a bargain, right? Why is everything relative, even when it shouldn't be? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? In this astounding book, behavioural economist Dan Ariely cuts to the heart of our strange behaviour, demonstrating how irrationality often supplants rational thought and that the reason for this is embedded in the very structure of our minds. Predicatably Irrational blends everyday experiences with a series of illuminating and often surprising experiments, that will change your understanding of human behaviour. And, by recognising these patterns, Ariely shows that we can make better decisions in business, in matters of collective welfare, and in our everyday lives from drinking coffee to losing weight, buying a car to choosing a romantic partner.
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Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
Ian Ayres
Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted? Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.
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A Practitioner’s Guide To Business Analytics -- Using Data Analysis Tools to Improve Your Organization’s Decision Making and Strategy
Randy Bartlett
The real tragedy of a company failing while using analytics is the fact that its leaders will have the data to explain the failure, but they won’t have the capabilities in place to effectively filter the data and convert it into actionable business insights. One implication of Big Data is that we need to adapt … quickly. A Practitioner’s Guide to Business Analytics integrates powerful strategies for leveraging analytics inside a business with a how-to playbook of tactics to make it happen.

The case for competing based on analytics is clear, but until now, there hasn’t been authoritative guidance for inciting a corporate community to evolve into a thriving, analytics-driven environment. This hands-on book gives you the tools, knowledge, and strategies to capture the level of organizational commitment you need to get business analytics up and running in your company. It helps you coherently define what business analytics is, quantify the exponential value it brings to an organization, and show others how to harness its power to gain advantage over competitors.

Accomplished business information professional Randy Bartlett brings his comprehensive coverage to life with firsthand accountants of using business analytics at brand-name global companies. Through in-depth examinations of success stories and failures in analytics-based decision making and data analyses, he fully prepares you to:

• Assess your company’s analytics needs and capabilities, and develop a strategic analytics plan
• Steward the three pillars of Best Statistical Practice and accurately measure the quality of analytics-based decisions and data analyses
• Build and organize a specialized Business Analytics Team to lead infrastructural changes
• Upgrade the foundation supporting business analytics—data collection, data software, and data management
• Create the essential synergy for success between the Business Analytics Team and IT

Effectively integrating analytics into everyday decision making, corporate culture, and business strategy is a multi-front exercise in leadership, execution, and support. The specialized tools and skill sets required to succeed are finally in one resource — A Practitioner’s Guide to Business Analytics.
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Paradox and Imperatives in Health Care How Efficiency, Effectiveness, and E-Transformation Can Conquer Waste and Optimize Quality
Jeffrey C. Bauer and Mark Hagland
Most hospitals, health systems, and other provider organizations in the United States are facing real financial peril. Mounting receivables from high-deductible health plans, financially challenged consumers, continuing cuts in Medicare, and a precarious economic environment suggest that real health care revenue has peaked. With operating costs increasing and critical investments in infrastructurea "both physical and virtuala "not being made, health care providers must find new ways to survive. In their groundbreaking collaboration, Paradox and Imperatives in Health Care, award-winning authors Jeffrey C. Bauer and Mark Hagland explain why providers must draw upon internal resources to increase net revenue and provide the quality of care that payers and consumers are demanding. Through numerous case studies, the authors show how pioneering health care organizations are using performance improvement toolsa "including lean management, Six-Sigma, and the Toyota Production Systema "to produce excellent services as inexpensively as possible. This book challenges health care leaders to change their "status quo" mentality and to put their organizations on a positive patha ] while redirection is still possible.
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Flawless Consulting
Peter Block
When the landmark best-seller Flawless Consulting was first published more than three decades ago, it was quickly adopted as the "consultant''s bible." With his legendary warmth and passion, Peter Block explained how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. The book continues to speak to people in a support function inside organizations as well as to external consultants. This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Peter Block''s groundbreaking book explores the latest thinking on consultation. It includes new insights about how we can organize our consulting around discovering the strengths, positive examples, and gifts of the client organization or community. The book remains a practical and specific guide for anyone who needs to develop a capacity for deeper relatedness and partnership -- which means it is for all who wish to make a real difference in the world.
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Flawless Consulting Fieldbook
Peter Block
In this time of free agency, outsourcing, and cross-functional work teams, consulting has become a part of everyone's job. Plus, we live in an era in which we are forced to hire professionals to provide the help we used to seek from friends. Some of this need for instant expertise is for reassurance; some is just that we do not have time to learn it ourselves. So, despite all the ambivalence surrounding consulting, it has grown into big business and generally infiltrated our lives.The intent of this book is: To support the integrity of your expertiseTo change your mind about how you interpret your own consulting experienceTo broaden your way of thinkingTo bring a manageable dose of therapy and art, philosophy and literature into you thoughts about consulting, andTo so it in a comforting and simple wayEnjoy this book, let it accompany you into the field, and use it as encouragement for writing your own story, which may the point of it all.
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The Business of Healthcare Innovation
Lawton Robert Burns
Robert Lawton Burns focuses on the key role of the 'producers' as the main source of innovation in this wide-ranging analysis of business trends in the manufacturing branch of the health care industry. Written by industry academics and executives, the book provides a detailed overview of the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, genomics/proteomics, medical device and information technology sectors. Most importantly, it describes the growing convergence between these sectors and the need for executives in one sector to increasingly draw upon trends in the others.
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Wheels, Clocks, and Rockets: A History of Technology
Donald Cardwell
As technology transforms our lives at an ever quickening rate, Donald Cardwell reminds us that technological innovation is not created in a vacuum "rather, it is the product of the successful interaction between social change, scientific developments, and political vision. In this wide-ranging, "spirited" ( Booklist) survey of the machines and tools that humans have developed throughout history, Cardwell not only explains the mechanical technicalities but also delves into the underlying trends that have culminated in eras of great change. In particular, he highlights the eighteenth century as a watershed in the modern history of technology, analyzing how scientific developments in physics and chemistry spurred the mechanical innovations of the Industrial Revolution. From the steam engine to electrical power to nuclear energy to today's world of electronics and computers, this book opens a discussion of how science and technology together change our lives.
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Comparative Analysis and Benchmarking: Corporate Strategy Analysis of Four International Pharmaceutical Companies
Hung-Hsin Chen
This research of corporate strategy analysis implements comparative analysis and benchmarking to analyse and examine the corporate strategy of the pharmaceutical sectors of 4 international pharmaceutical companies. Most existing studies of pharmaceutical industry have been limited to some specific fields such as the R&D ability, new products launch time, acquisitions, and alliances. Little has been known about the analysis of corporate strategy and comparison of pharmaceutical industry by both internal and external factors. On the other hand, the comparative strategy and benchmarking have been frequently applied in analysing the corporate strategy mostly in public service industries, in financial and accounting industry, and in insurance industry. Little has been applied to examine and analyse the corporate strategy of research-based industries such as pharmaceutical industry. This research aims to fill the gap by implementing these two techniques to analyse and examine the corporate strategies of 4 research based pharmaceutical companies. This research adopts the hybrid approach of combining qualitative and quantitative methods in a two stages research design.
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Forecasting for the Pharmaceutical Industry: Models for New Product And In-market Forecasting And How to Use Them
Arthur G. Cook
In virtually every decision, a pharmaceutical executive considers some type of forecast. This process of predicting the future is crucial to many aspects of the company - from next month's production schedule, to market estimates for drugs in the next decade. The pharmaceutical forecaster needs to strike a delicate balance between over-engineering the forecast - including rafts of data and complex 'black box' equations that few stakeholders understand and even fewer buy into - and an overly simplistic approach that relies too heavily on anecdotal information and opinion.Art Cook's highly pragmatic guide explains the basis of a successful balanced forecast for products in development as well as currently marketed products. The author explores the pharmaceutical forecasting process; the varied tools and methods for new product and in-market forecasting; how they can be used to communicate market dynamics to the various stakeholders; and the strengths and weaknesses of different forecast approaches.The text is liberally illustrated with tables, diagrams and examples. The final extended case study provides the reader with an opportunity to test out their knowledge.Forecasting for the Pharmaceutical Industry is a definitive guide for forecasters as well as the multitude of decision makers and executives who rely on forecasts in their decision making.
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Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results
Thomas H. Davenport
Most companies have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But a powerful new business tool - analytics - is enabling many firms to aggressively leverage their data in key business decisions and processes, with impressive results. In their previous book, "Competing on Analytics," Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris showed how pioneering firms were building their entire strategies around their analytical capabilities. Rather than "going with the gut" when pricing products, maintaining inventory, or hiring talent, managers in these firms use data, analysis, and systematic reasoning to make decisions that improve efficiency, risk-management, and profits. Now, in "Analytics at Work," Davenport, Harris, and coauthor Robert Morison reveal how any manager can effectively deploy analytics in day-to-day operations--one business decision at a time. They show how many types of analytical tools, from statistical analysis to qualitative measures like systematic behavior coding, can improve decisions about everything from what new product offering might interest customers to whether marketing dollars are being most effectively deployed. Based on all-new research and illustrated with examples from companies including Humana, Best Buy, Progressive Insurance, and Hotels.com, this implementation-focused guide outlines the five-step DELTA model for deploying and succeeding with analytical initiatives.
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Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
You have more information at hand about your business environment than ever before. But are you using it to "out-think" your rivals? If not, you may be missing out on a potent competitive tool.In Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning , Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris argue that the frontier for using data to make decisions has shifted dramatically. Certain high-performing enterprises are now building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights that in turn generate impressive business results. Their secret weapon? Analytics: sophisticated quantitative and statistical analysis and predictive modeling.Exemplars of analytics are using new tools to identify their most profitable customers and offer them the right price, to accelerate product innovation, to optimize supply chains, and to identify the true drivers of financial performance. A wealth of examples-from organizations as diverse as Amazon, Barclay's, Capital One, Harrah's, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia, and the Boston Red Sox-illuminate how to leverage the power of analytics.
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How to Think like Leornardo da Vinci
Michael Gelb
Genius is made, not born. And human beings are gifted with an almost unlimited potential for learning and creativity. Now you can uncover your own hidden abilities, sharpen your senses, and liberate your unique intelligence—by following the example of the greatest genius of all time, Leonardo da Vinci. Acclaimed author Michael J. Gelb, who has helped thousands of people expand their minds to accomplish more than they ever thought possible, shows you how. Drawing on Da Vinci's notebooks, inventions, and legendary works of art, Gelb introduces Seven Da Vincian Principles—the essential elements of genius—from curiosità, the insatiably curious approach to life to connessione, the appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things. With Da Vinci as your inspiration, you will discover an exhilarating new way of thinking.
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Blink
Malcolm Gladwell
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making.
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The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
'The Tipping Points' is an intellectual adventure story written with an infectious enthusiasm for the power and joy of new ideas. Most of all, it is a road map to change, with a hopeful message - that one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world.
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The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction
Trevor Hastie
During the past decade there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. With it have come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It is a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting---the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book.This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least angle regression & path algorithms for the lasso, non-negative matrix factorization, and spectral clustering. There is also a chapter on methods for ``wide'' data (p bigger than n), including multiple testing and false discovery rates.Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University.
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Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
Jeff Howe
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it's talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable. Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon.
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How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Douglas W. Hubbard
This insightful and eloquent book will show you how to measure those things in your own business that, until now, you may have considered "immeasurable," including customer satisfaction, organizational flexibility, technology risk, and technology ROI.Adds even more intuitive explanations of powerful measurement methods and shows how they can be applied to areas such as risk management and customer satisfactionContinues to boldly assert that any perception of "immeasurability" is based on certain popular misconceptions about measurement and measurement methodsShows the common reasoning for calling something immeasurable, and sets out to correct those ideasOffers practical methods for measuring a variety of "intangibles"Adds recent research, especially in regards to methods that seem like measurement, but are in fact a kind of "placebo effect" for management - and explains how to tell effective methods from management mythology
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The Strategic Pricing of Pharmaceuticals
E.M. (Mick) Kolassa
The Strategic Pricing of Pharmaceuticals explains how pharmaceutical prices are, and should be set, in the US and international markets. The book discusses how pharmaceuticals are different from other products in terms of value and why typical assumptions and approaches to pricing fail to consider the true nature of pharmaceuticals or to capture their value. This book provides pharmaceutical marketers with needed guidance through the use of in-depth discussions and analyses of the factors that should be considered when setting and managing pharmaceutical prices.
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Pharmaceutical Marketing: Principles, Environment, and Practice
Mickey C. Smith, Eugene Mick Kolassa, James Greg Perkins and Bruce R Siecker
Explore the nuts and bolts of marketing pharmaceuticals today! Written by leading authorities in the field, Pharmaceutical Marketing: Principles, Environment, and Practice is the fifth in Dr. Mickey Smith's series of books on the subject which began in the 1960s. In this extraordinary book, he and his co-authors examine the principles of marketing pharmaceuticals, describe the environmental factors that affect their application, and show how these principles can be applied in response to those factors in practice. From the history and development of marketing pharmaceuticals to channel systems, legal requirements, budgeting, and product placement, this essential volume is a comprehensive text that will help students prepare for successful careers in this expanding field. From editor Mickey Smith: Looking back on 40 years of experience, I've recently begun saying that most of the things I knew about pharmaceutical marketing over the years that made me so smart are not true anymore. But the fact is that the principles of marketing are as true as they were when they appeared in my first book (published in 1968). What has changed, and had to change, was the way the principles are applied. This book is based on the premise that marketing follows certain principles and that pharmaceutical marketing is affected by a variety of environmental influences which lead to a rich array of marketing practices. These practices are presented to demonstrate how the successful application of marketing principles--with appropriate adaptation to environmental forces--can lead to success in the marketplace.
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Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting
Gert Laursen
Filled with examples and forward-thinking guidance from renowned BA leaders Gert Laursen and Jesper Thorlund, Business, Analytics for Managers offers powerful techniques for making increasingly advanced use of information in order to survive any market conditions. Improve your business's decision making. Align your business processes with your business's objectives, Drive your company into a prosperous future. Taking BA from buzzword to enormous value-maker, Business Analytics for Managers helpsyou do it all with workable solutions that will add tremendous value toyour business. Data warehousing. Source data. Business intelligence. You've heard the buzzwords before, but what is your business doing with these priceless mountains of data it generates? Are you using this information properly to gain a competitive edge? Or are you just sitting on it? Now you can discover how your company can take information created in the general course of business and put it to work to boost corporate performance. Taking a holistic---rather than a technical---approach, Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting explores why business analytics (BA) should be important to you, whether you're in sales, marketing, management, finance, HR, production, or analysis.
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How We Decide
Jonah Lehrer
Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we "blink" and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering that this is not how the mind works.Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason—and the precise mix depends on the situation. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think. Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of "deciders"—from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?
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Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel
Gordon S. Linoff
Three key efforts are essential to effectively transform data into actionable information: retrieving data with SQL, presenting data with Excel, and understanding statistics as the foundation of data analysis. Data mining expert Gordon Linoff focuses on these topics and shows you how SQL and Excel can be used to extract business information from relational databases. He begins by taking a look at how data is central to the task of understanding customers, products, and markets, and he then goes on to show you how to use that data to define business dimensions, store transactions about customers, and summarize important data to produce results. Along the way, he shares stories based on his personal experience in the field, intended to enrich your understanding of why some things work--and others don't. Each chapter explains when and why to perform a particular type of business analysis in order to obtain useful results, how to design and perform the analysis using SQL and Excel, and what you can expect the results to look like. Throughout the book, critical features of Excel are highlighted, interesting uses of Excel graphics are explained, and dataflows and graphical representations of data processing are used to illustrate how SQL works.
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Brand Planning for the Pharmaceutical Industry
Janice MacLennan
Janice MacLennan picks up two of the themes touched on in Marketing Planning - market segmentation and branding, and the inter-relationship between these two - and makes them key topics for discussion. Brand Planning for the Pharmaceutical Industry begins by exploring what branding is and why it is of importance, particularly to the pharmaceutical sector. The book then goes on to show how branding can be integrated into the early stages of the commercialization process for new products, both in theory and in the 'real' world. The book provides a step-by-step guide to brand planning, using market segmentation as the starting point.The book is split into two parts, the first dealing comprehensively with brand planning for products yet to get to the market, with the second part applying the same process to products that are already on the market. Both parts are extremely pragmatic, full of pertinent examples and insights from the pharmaceutical industry, and are directly applicable to your own brand planning.Brand Planning for the Pharmaceutical Industry concludes by confronting the problems that organizations are likely to have in actually making brand planning an integral part of their work and presents strategies for dealing with them.
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Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy
Joan Magretta
Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter's frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter's name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts. Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter's revolutionary thinking. Written with Porter's full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this new book delivers fresh, clear examples to illustrate and update Porter's ideas.
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Pharmaceutical Product Branding Strategies: Simulating Patient Flow and Portfolio Dynamics
Paich Mark, Corey Peck and Jason Valant
This updated Second Edition details how marketers, forecasters, and brand planners can achieve optimal success by building internally consistent simulation models to project future behavior of patients, physicians, and R&D processes. By introducing the reader to the complexities facing many pharmaceutical firms, specifically issues around cross-functional coordination and knowledge integration, this guide provides a framework for dynamic modeling of interest to several pharmaceutical markets, including epidemiology, market definitions, compliance/persistency, and revenue generation in the context of patient flows or movements.
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The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics
Thornton May
Learn to manage and grow successful analytical teams within your business. Examining analytics-one of the hottest business topics today-The new know argues that analytics is needed by all enterprises in order to be successful. Until now, enterprises have been required to know what happened in the past, but in today's environment, your organization is expected to have a good knowledge of what happens next. This innovative book covers: Where analytics live in the enterprise; The value of analytics; Relationships betwixt and between; Technologies of analytics; Markets and marketers of analytics. The new know is a timely, essential resource to staying competitive in your field.
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Federal Pharmaceutical Purchasing
Daniel N. Mendelson
Presented at National Health Policy Forum Session, "Pharmaceutical Marketplace Dynamics," May 31, 2000
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Health Care in the New Millennium: Vision, Values, and Leadership
Ian Morrison
Health Care in the New Millennium is written by futurist Ian Morrison-author of The Second Curve and Future Tense and one of our nation's foremost health care analysts.In this provocative book, Morrison gives health care executives, doctors, and nurses a guided tour of what's in store for health care in the coming years and explains . . .

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Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications
Robert Nisbet
The Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications is a comprehensive professional reference book that guides business analysts, scientists, engineers and researchers (both academic and industrial) through all stages of data analysis, model building and implementation. The Handbook helps one discern the technical and business problem, understand the strengths and weaknesses of modern data mining algorithms, and employ the right statistical methods for practical application. Use this book to address massive and complex datasets with novel statistical approaches and be able to objectively evaluate analyses and solutions. It has clear, intuitive explanations of the principles and tools for solving problems using modern analytic techniques, and discusses their application to real problems, in ways accessible and beneficial to practitioners across industries - from science and engineering, to medicine, academia and commerce. This handbook brings together, in a single resource, all the information a beginner will need to understand the tools and issues in data mining to build successful data mining solutions.
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Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes
Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne
In Microtrends, one of the most respected and sought-after analysts in the world articulates a new way of understanding how we live. Mark Penn, the man who identified "Soccer Moms" as a crucial constituency in President Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, is known for his ability to detect relatively small patterns of behavior in our culture-microtrends that are wielding great influence on business, politics, and our personal lives. Only one percent of the public, or three million people, is enough to launch a business or social movement. Relying on some of the best data available, Penn identifies more than 70 microtrends in religion, leisure, politics, and family life that are changing the way we live.
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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink
Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money-the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink in Drive. In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home-is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation- autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.
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A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Daniel H. Pink
The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't. Drawing on research from around the world, Pink outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment-and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here.
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Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
Michael Porter
The essential complement to the pathbreaking book Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. With over 30 printings in English and translated into thirteen languages, this second volume in Porter's landmark trilogy describes how a firm actually gains an advantage over its rivals. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into "activities," or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

Now an essential part of international business thinking, Competitive Advantage takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities. Competitive Advantage also provides for the first time the tools to strategically segment an industry and rigorously assess the competitive logic of diversification.
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Innovation and Commercialisation in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: Creating and Capturing Value
Dr. Bruce Rasmussen
The processes of discovery, testing and distribution of new medicines have undergone radical change in recent decades, from a focus on small molecule drugs to biomedicine and related technologies. Bruce Rasmussen very effectively draws upon modern theories of the firm, data analysis, and case studies to provide important insights into the consequences of this change. He offers convincing evidence that contradicts the widely-held view that the biopharmaceutical sector has not generated considerable economic value. Frank R. Lichtenberg, Columbia University, US Bio- and pharmaceutical industry discovery is a distressed asset today. Why? Bruce Rasmussen s book is a timely and very informative work, building on rich data sources and extensive economic research, on a subject of concern to us all. Is medicine discovery in permanent decline? Are the biotechnology and traditional pharma groups on a collision course, will the traditional group absorb the new, will integration take place, will a new discovery model emerge? I commend Bruce s book to all who wish to understand what is happening. David W. Anstice, Merck & Co., Inc. This path-breaking book addresses the ongoing implications for traditional pharmaceutical companies and biopharmaceutical start-ups of the realignment of the industry knowledge-base. The theoretical approach draws on the modern theory of the firm and related ideas in order to better define the concept of the business model, which is employed to guide the case studies and empirical analysis in the book. The author shows that while traditional pharmaceutical companies have successfully adjusted their business models to meet the challenges of biotechnology, biopharmaceutical start-ups have experienced more problems. Despite the poor financial performance of the vast majority of these firms, the biopharmaceutical sector as a whole has created significant value. However, this has been captured disproportionately by a handful of large, fully-integrated biopharmaceutical firms and, to a lesser extent, by the largest dozen pharmaceutical companies.
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Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset
Thomas C. Redman
Your company's data has the potential to add enormous value to every facet of the organization -- from marketing and new product development to strategy to financial management. Yet if your company is like most, it's not using its data to create strategic advantage. Data sits around unused -- or incorrect data fouls up operations and decision making. In Data Driven, Thomas Redman, the "Data Doc," shows how to leverage and deploy data to sharpen your company's competitive edge and enhance its profitability. The author reveals:

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The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand
Al Ries and Laura Ries
Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries. Combining The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, this book proclaims that the only way to stand out in today's marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand—and provides the step-by-step instructions you need to do so. It also tackles one of the most challenging marketing problems today: branding on the Web. The Rieses divulge the controversial and counterintuitive strategies and secrets that both small and large companies have used to establish internet brands. It is the essential primer on building a category-dominating, world-class brand.
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The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Barry Schwartz
Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions--both big and small--have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice--the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish--becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice--from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs--has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse.
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Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Charles Seife
The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for the theory of everything. Zero follows the number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe and its apotheosis as the mystery of the black hole. Elegant, witty, and utterly fascinating, Zero takes us from Aristotle to superstring theory by way of Pythagoras, Descartes, the Kabbalists, and Einstein. It is a compelling look at the strangest number in the universe, and one of the greatest paradoxes of human thought.
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The Profit Zone: How Strategic Business Design Will Lead You to Tomorrow's Profits
Adrian J. Slywotzky, David J. Morrison, Bob Andelman
The book that answers the most fundamental question in business: Where Will I Make a Profit Tomorrow?

Why do some companies create sustained, superior profits year after year? Why are they always far ahead of their competitors in discovering the ever-changing profit zones of their industry? Why do others languish as their traditional way of doing business turns into a no-profit zone? The Profit Zone provides the answers. It is a brilliant, original, and practical explanation of how and why high profit happens.
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Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day—and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution. The scientific establishment of Europe—from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton—had mapped the heavens in both hemispheres in its certain pursuit of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution—a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest, and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.
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Longitude
Jonathan Coy
In the 18th century, the only way to navigate accurately at sea was to follow a coastline all the way, which would not get you from Europe to the West Indies or the Americas. Observing the sun or stars would give you the latitude, but not the longitude unless done in conjunction with a clock that would keep time accurately at sea, and no such clock existed. After one too many maritime disasters due to navigational errors, the British Parliament set up a substantial prize for a way to find the longitude at sea. The film's main story is that of craftsman John Harrison: he built a clock that would do the job, what we would now call a marine chronometer. But the Board of Longitude was biased against this approach and claimed the prize was no simple matter. Told in parallel is the 20th century story of Rupert Gould, for whom the restoration of Harrison's clocks to working order became first a hobby, then an obsession that threatened to wreck his life.
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The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.
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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible." For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
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Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Richard Thaler
Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful "choice architecture" can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new take—from neither the left nor the right—on many hot-button issues, for individuals and governments alike. This is one of the most engaging and provocative books to come along in many years.
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Best American Science Writing Series
Edited by Rebecca Skloot, award-winning science writer and New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and her father, Floyd Skloot, an award-winning poet and writer, and past contributor to the series, The Best American Science Writing 2011 collects into one volume the most crucial, thought-provoking, and engaging science writing of the year. Culled from a wide variety of publications, these selections of outstanding journalism cover the full spectrum of scientific inquiry, providing a comprehensive overview of the most compelling, relevant, and exciting developments in the world of science. Provocative and engaging, The Best American Science Writing 2011 reveals just how far science has brought us—and where it is headed next.
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