Business Analytics Course

1 What is this, and who is this for?

This book resulted from my experience teaching a leadership course in business analytics to grad students at NYU. I taught six semesters from 2021-2023, and this book is a distillation of the course material I created.

The course was designed to help students gain a leadership perspective on the basics of business analytics, and how to use data to make informed decisions as leaders.

This is NOT a book on coding, though writing code to wrangle data can be often be inseparable from good decision making. For the hands-on person, there is code available as well, while acknowledging that there are better resources, including AI agents, that do a better job at code.

Readers can completely ignore all code (by collapsing the code blocks) and still get the intended leadership perspective this is intended to provide. My hope is that it will help practitioners think about how to approach problems in a data-driven way, and ask the right questions of their teams. This can only happen if they are aware of the techniques and tools available to them and their teams.

• Navigate the course using the book chapters
• Start with the introduction and work through each chapter
• Use the notebook pages for examples and exercises