Tag: EMBA

#datamustread: How to Master Your Data Journey

Covers of Info We Trust, Visual Analytics with Tableau, The Big Book of Dashboards
From ideas to dashboards: The Data Journey Canon

Last year I started lecturing a Data Analytics course at university (as part of an MBA program). In the meanwhile, I was refining the list of books that I highly recommend to read. Three of these books form the Data Journey!

What is the Data Journey?

The Data Journey is a human-focused approach to understand the evolution of data storytelling, the power of visual analytics, and the impact of data from real-world business scenarios.

1. Info We Trust: How to Inspire the World with Data

We start our Data Journey with the book Info We Trust. This book examines all parts of the data storytelling lifecycle across disciplines. The use of marginalia and hand-drawn illustrations give you both simple lessons to take away, and insights into where to find out more. The book is full of magnificent references that inspire further reading.

2. Visual Analytics with Tableau

Now it’s time for hands-on. Visual Analytics with Tableau covers everything you need to get started with Tableau (students get Tableau for free!). The book guides you from the first steps of connecting to data, creating different types of charts, and adding calculation fields to more advanced features such as table calculations, forecasts, and clusters, as well as R, Python, and MATLAB integration for sophisticated statistical modeling.

3. The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios

Back to business (as this course is designed for an MBA program). We close our Data Journey canon with The Big Book of Dashboards. This is a comprehensive reference book with real-world solutions for business dashboards and detailed analysis of do’s and don’ts. The examples in this book are well-organized and categorized by industry and functional business areas.

Update 10 July 2019: Do you need more inspiration?

#MakeoverMonday: Improving How We Visualize and Analyze Data, One Chart at a Time

Because vizzing alone is only half the fun, you should not miss the #MakeoverMonday book. Eva Murray and Andy Kriebel are icons in the data visualization community (read the interview!) and they have curated the thousands of visualizations from the #MakeoverMonday project into a practical guide that will take your design and data communication skills to the next level!

Which books would you recommend for the #DataJourney?

Share your favorite data books in the blog post comments or reply to this tweet:

How China is winning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Alibaba Campus
Alibaba Campus

Currently, I’m on a 4-week China trip, visiting many cities. In Hangzhou, I met CEIBS peers who work for Alibaba. While the Alibaba campus is quite impressive, I got even more impressed by Alibaba’s leadership culture, which is encouraging its employees to innovate as intrapreneurs.

If you start your own project (a new mobile app, a patent, a scientific paper, etc.), you’re doing it in your own pace, you’re not being micro-managed and you’ll receive a bonus based on success. Intrapreneurship at Alibaba is just one of many examples where we (Europeans) can learn a lot from China!

Yue and me, Hangzhou West Lake

While traveling in China I was reading AI Superpowers: China Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee, a book that is a must-read to get an idea where China’s AI ambitions are heading to. What matters most for AI innovation these days, the author argues, is access to vast quantities of data—where China’s advantage is overwhelming.

A quite entertaining book focusing on the new mindset of China’s young generation is this one: Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World by Zak Dychtwald.

: Which other cities in China did I visit? Check out my Tableau Public viz:

Leadership: Stagnation Kills Your Business, 3 Times

Petronas Twin Towers
Petronas Twin Towers held the title of the tallest building in the world for six years (Flickr)

Your business has been thriving, and the pipeline is well filled with work? Don’t get comfortable too soon. Stagnation kicks in fast nowadays, and kills your business’ innovation, its growth, and its people.

1. Innovation 

The speed of transformation that we are currently witnessing is challenging all of us to think differently. Every industry can be disrupted, there is no safe habour. So we need to deliver our products and services in a way that is relevant today, not yesterday.

Minor product iterations do not work forever. We need to prepare product revolutions, not just iterations on what we were selling since ten years. Establishing an innovation lab engages our employees to think in innovative ways and lift our business to new heights.

2. Growth

We need to adjust our business development plan to drive business growth. This should not be a static document. Customer and market definition are changing fast and we need to adopt this in our sales strategy and in our product development.

This does not work without data. Therefore we need to implement a data strategy. Our data strategy guides our entire business how to collect and analyze data, and how to generate the insights that we use for our decisions. If we do not take advantage of data, our competition will do.

3. People

Sushi Google DoodleIt is essential for leaders to recognize that you cannot possibly manage everything. We need to employ great people. But recruiting is not the end. We need to keep your talents, empower them, and motivate them to take initiative in their roles. Stagnation will rotate employees out of the company.

Offering free sushi and laundry service might impress our new hires from university. Experienced and independent employees will be more interested in career perspectives. We should establish personal development plans for everyone, not just for the designated managers.

Although it is important for leaders to set such a career framework, we should not forget to invest in your employees’ training. Both, hard skills (technical) and soft skills (non-technical), are mandatory because they each play very important roles in the development of our employees.

In Summary

Yesterday’s innovations are tomorrow’s commodities. We need to invest in innovations, otherwise we will face disruptive competition. Creating insights from data is important for the iterative adjustments on our business development plan. Offering personal development plans and proper training avoids stagnation for your employees, which is causing brain drain.

This post is also published on LinkedIn.

My First Impressions of Tableau: a Seattle-Based Analytics Startup Company

My Tableau bootcamp buddies
My Tableau bootcamp buddies, ready to conquer the world of analytics together

As a data enthusiast and very early adopter of Tableau, I was excited to join Tableau, a Seattle-based startup company that is coming up with the next level of self-service data analytics software – compared to classic BI software. My first weeks have been nothing short of amazing, with an incredible opportunity to contribute to company building and be one of the first employees in Tableau’s new Frankfurt Office that was just recently opened to ramp up Tableau’s Europe business.

Being part of a startup company is an incredible experience, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work on such an innovative and disruptive product. It is a privilege to be involved in building a company from the ground up, especially in such an exciting industry as data analytics.

Tableau’s new Frankfurt Office has brought exciting opportunities, especially for me, who just earned my MBA degree. I have been able to apply my newfound knowledge to contribute to the growth of the company. I am honored to be part of the team that is bringing this new product to market and to be able to learn from some of the best minds in the business.

Tableau’s bootcamp in Seattle is nothing short of awesome. The three-week program is intense, but the wealth of knowledge and experience that I have gained from it has been invaluable. I have learned a lot about the company’s culture, the product, and the industry as a whole. The bootcamp has given me a great foundation for my work at Tableau and has helped me hit the ground running in my role as one of the first employees in Frankfurt, Europe’s hub for finance and technology.

Tableau is known for its unique company culture that encourages creativity, innovation, and collaboration. From weekly hackathons to Tableau’s famous Data Night Out events, there’s always something exciting happening at the company. As someone who is passionate about data and thrives in a collaborative environment, I couldn’t be more thrilled to be a part of this culture.

Being involved in company building is a great thing when you’re in a startup, and I am honored to be part of this exciting journey. I look forward to continuing to contribute to the growth of the company and to be part of a team that is making such a huge impact in the world of data analytics. If you’re looking for a challenging and rewarding career in data analytics, Tableau is definitely the place to be.

And yes, we all get these awesome DATA hoodies:

 

How to unleash Data Science with an MBA?

Servers record a copy of LHC data and distribute it around the world for Analytics

My Data Science journey starts at CERN where I finished my master thesis in 2009. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and has some questions to answer: like how the universe works and what is it made of. CERN collects nearly unbelievable amounts of data – 35 petabytes of data per year that needs analysis. After submitted my thesis, I continued my Data Science research at CERN.

I began to wonder: Which insights are to be discovered beyond Particle Physics? How can traditional companies benefit from Data Science? After almost four exciting years at CERN with plenty of Hadoop and Map/Reduce, I decided to join Capgemini to develop business in Big Data Analysics, and to boost their engagements in Business Intelligence. In order to leverage my data-driven background I enrolled for the Executive MBA program at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management including an Emerging Markets module at CEIBS in Shanghai.

Today companies have realized that Business Analytics needs to be an essential part of their competitive strategy. The demand on Data Scientists grows exponentially. To me, Data Science is more about the right questions being asked than the actual data. The MBA enabled me to understand that data does not provide insights unless appropriately questioned. Delivering excellent Big Data projects requires a full understanding of the business, developing the questions, distilling the adequate amount of data to answer those questions and communicating the proposed solution to the target audience.

“The task of leaders is to simplify. You should be able to explain where you have to go in two minutes.” – Jeroen van der Veer, former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell