Data Fluency Quotes

“Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.”4 —John Steinbeck, from an interview in the Fall 1975 The Paris Review”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Therefore, communicating with data is less often about telling a specific story and more like starting a guided conversation. It is a dialogue with the audience rather than a monologue.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“The primary insight offered in a pie chart comes from slices that are smaller or larger than you would expect. Readers must imagine what they would expect the pie chart to look like and then find the differences.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Data is a lens, a perspective on real life that is grounded in something tangible. Consider,”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Each row in raw data represents an element—an individual, atomic thing from the real world. It”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Data products are often designed to deliver everything and the kitchen sink.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“If you don’t have a shared data culture and ecosystem, your data will be siloed. This limits what you can learn and the questions you can ask. The”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Reports have a way of multiplying like rabbits. Start”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Measures of frantic reporting activity can be equally misguided. While we worked at AOL, the business intelligence group was proud of the hundreds of reports it generated every month and how this number was growing.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“A data fluency culture breaks down when people spend more time debating terminology, calculations, and validity of data sources rather than discussing what action to take based on the results.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Individuals trained in communicating with data will grow frustrated in an organization without the tools and expectations that align with their skills. Likewise,”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“When individuals and teams within an organization achieve data fluency, unproductive discussions about “where did that data come from?” and “what does that value mean?” are exchanged for deeper discussions about key organizational goals and metrics. Data”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Many organizations we encounter lament their spreadsheet-driven culture. Every department has its own mechanism for gathering, analyzing, and reporting on its unique data. No consistent “source of truth” exists and data analysts become indispensable because they are the only people in the organization who know how a financial model works, how to access and understand the data sources, and its strengths and weaknesses. People in these organizations wish for a technology solution that could bring all the information together and make it available to all decision makers in interactive, visual dashboards.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Although generations of teenagers have learned how to drive as a rite of passage into adulthood, and with it have found new degrees of freedom, we have not systematized the acquisition of skills essential to ensure data fluency. The”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“More than ever, data will be a large part of how you convey messages. You need to ensure that everyone in your organization can participate in the discussion.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“How do you create common ground for more effective data communication? You can start by teaching the fundamental grammar of data visualization: metrics, dimensions, distributions, relationships, outliers, and variance. You”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication

“Fundamentally, failing to use data isn’t a technological problem, but a social problem.”
― Zach Gemignani, Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication