While this book could be described as basic statistics for people responsible for making business decisions, that would not do it credit. For me, by far the greatest value was around the pragmatic and down to earth approach to decision making.

The approach challenges decision makers to figure out what tangible outcome they actually care about, and think creatively to come up with low cost observations that can be measured. It goes on to give readers tools to determine how much they don't know and how valuable a particular bit of information might be to get. Finally, it describes some basic statistical tools to do the measurements.

There are some fundamental rules of thumb and truths that are sprinkled throughout the book that have influenced how I think. These include pearls of wisdom such as:

- Assume that you already have all of the information you need.
- Assume that there is a way to measure the thing you want to measure, and likely someone has already done it.
- You can reduce your uncertainty a lot without a lot of effort.

A highly, highly valuable book for anyone making important decisions.

One minor note: There are a bunch of mathy bits in the middle that really don't work in audio format. Luckily, those materials are available for download on their website. If you're listening to the audio format, expect to download some worksheets and spreadsheets as homework.