Thinking Analytically

I just stumbled on a great article published at The McKinsey Quarterly earlier this year. In it, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, urges executives to sharpen their understanding of analytics and the relationship between technology and innovation.  Buried in the article was this quote:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.
People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that
computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The
ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it,
to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate
it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational
level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college
kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous
data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand
that data and extract value from it.

Well…maybe there’s hope!

What better way to start the month than to immerse yourself in some excellent data visualizations.  webdesigner depot has assembled 50 Great Examples of Data Visualzations including Narratives 2.0 visualization of Beethoven’s 5th.

I can hear it now!