My recent post on Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery , 2nd Edition reminds me I have not mentioned other good books that have been published recently. Three great books published last year are:

• Six Sigma Beyond the Factory Floor by Ronald D. Snee and Roger W. Hoerl.
• Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers

And Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies by Russell L. Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin will be available soon.

For more great management improvement books see Curious Cat Management Improvement Books.

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Go Badgers

Comments on Who Influences Your Thinking? - Survey results -

> 1. Are people getting most of their information
> from other sources?
That would be my guess.

Similar to the phenomenon of “the long tail” which is an interesting topic in its own right. We tend to focus on the popular few (books, musicians, movies, authors, computer programs…) but often the sum of the less popular many is more significant. See:

• The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, Wired, Oct 2004 “The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are”
• Continued discussion of the Amazon figures in a Chiris Anderson’s blog. “I’ve now spoken to Jeff Bezos (and others) about this. He doesn’t have a hard figure for the percentage of sales of products not available offline, but reckons that it’s closer to 25-30%.”
• The long tail - a secret sauce for companies like Amazon.com, Netflix and Apple Computer, Motley Fool, NPR Audio Recording

Getting back to the question raised by the “Who Influences Your Thinking” post; More importantly I believe they (we) are just failing to get all we should.
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The classic Statistics for Experimenters has been updated by George Box and Stu Hunter, two of the three original authors. Bill Hunter, who was my father, and the other author, died in 1986. Order online: Statistics for Experimenters: Design, Innovation, and Discovery , 2nd Edition by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, William G. Hunter.
I happen to agree with those who call this book a classic, however, I am obviously biased.

Google Scholar citations for the first edition of Statistics for Experimenters.
Citations in Cite Seer to the first edition.

The first edition includes the text of Experiment by Cole Porter. In 1978 finding a recording of this song was next to impossible. Now Experiment can be heard on the De-Lovely soundtrack.

Text from the publisher on the 2nd Edition:
Rewritten and updated, this new edition of Statistics for Experimenters adopts the same approaches as the landmark First Edition by teaching with examples, readily understood graphics, and the appropriate use of computers. Catalyzing innovation, problem solving, and discovery, the Second Edition provides experimenters with the scientific and statistical tools needed to maximize the knowledge gained from research data, illustrating how these tools may best be utilized during all stages of the investigative process. The authors’ practical approach starts with a problem that needs to be solved and then examines the appropriate statistical methods of design and analysis.
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We have created a new blog, Curious Cat Articles and Links, where we will post links to articles and web sites we find interesting.