Discuss the utility of statistics as a managerial tool. Also describe its limitations.”

Important decisions are rarely made by intuition alone. We need to use data to develop our insights and to support our analyses. Furthermore, we often need to develop simple models to structure our reasoning and communicate our analyses in a defensible way to others. Ultimately we have to trust our intuition, but in refining our insight we generally seek to use data and models in the most coherent way.

The basic objective of THE MANAGERIAL STATISTICS is to help you become more comfortable with simple statistical analysis. We shall discuss concepts that will enable you to understand topics such as corporate risk, market research and forecasting, which are encountered later in the EMBA-Global programme. The aim of this Managerial statisticcs is to teach when a technique is appropriate and what it can achieve, leaving the computational aspects to the computer. The emphasis throughout the course is on concepts and reasoning, rather than technical details. You should acquire, or reacquire, some basic skills in data analysis, but more importantly, become a more informed and critical user of business statistical analyses, as for example, might be undertaken by market researchers, consulting and financial analysts.