We're awash in data. Here's how to make yours matter.

When this regular Ivey Business Journal contributor recommends a certain book, executives can be assured that they will derive value from the book. Even if it is a black swan.

Predictive analytics is emerging as a practical discipline, one that can help business leaders make better decisions. In a world whose complexity in many respects has moved beyond our cognitive abilities, numbers are nothing to fear. In fact, they may be your greatest ally.

Why are business and economic forecasts so often wrong, and why can’t they be improved? In a new feature from s+b -- Author's Choice -- leading writers select and introduce passages from notable books. In this piece, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, introduces an engaging lesson in business forecasting from Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You, by Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth, and Anil Gaba.

Simulations study the interaction of random variables in a business process over time - how many customers might walk in the door at any moment, the return on an upcoming advertising campaign, the chance of your information system going down - and use the results to improve business policies. This article provides an overview of simulation and shows how it's particularly useful for learning about the dynamics of a business process over time. It includes a simulation step-through designed to teach the basics of the technique, its structure, and its function. The paper goes over the necessary components of a simulation model, how the model actually works, and what to do with the data generated by the simulation. A discussion on issues surrounding the commercial use of simulation runs throughout the paper. [BNET Annotation]

Do statistics tell the entire story? Managers must make effective use of the numbers they generate. Here are five tips to help ensure that you can rely on the numbers.

Keep this link on hand for the ultimate list of statistical calculators. The site features good basic sample size calculators as well as calculators for more advanced research methodologies (see Power Calculators or Correlation and Regression Calculators). Remember that market testing and research are at the heart of good marketing ROI practices. The more insight you can gain into what marketing activities, campaigns, offers and segmentation are driving your profitability, the better to improve your returns. For the more sophisticated calculators, you'll need to have a good understanding of statistical terms, since these are student projects and there is no documentation to guide you. On the other hand, the site even offers a tool for those creative folks with "mathphobia" -- check out the RGB calculator, which will show you Web colors and the corresponding hexadecimal code. [WDFM Annotation]

Step one is connecting the seat of the intellect to the seat of the pants.

Editor's Note: a useful look at the "flaw of averages" and approaches for modeling uncertainty (e.g Monte Carlo simulation, etc.)