Practical Statistics: A Handbook for Business Projects

Statistics is the most widely used quantitative method in business. It is concerned with extracting the best possible information from data in order to aid decision making.

Practical Statistics is a clear and concise introduction to business statistics for graduate business and management students, MBA students and professionals. It gives the reader a solid understanding of statistics without being too simple or mind-numbingly complex. It turns business statistics, often perceived as being difficult and pointless, into something approachable and sensible. It covers key topics, such as what data is, populations and samples, measuring risk, the normal distribution and sampling distributions, analyzing univariate data, analyzing bivariate data, analyzing multivariate data with dependency, analyzing multivariate data for interdependency.

Statistics professor John Buglear emphasizes the importance of working back from results rather than working out results. He starts the book with basic concepts which get increasingly harder, uses simple metaphors to aid understanding and tables and diagrams throughout.

About the Author

John Buglear is Head of the Nottingham Business School Division of Management. He teaches Quantitative Methods and Basic Accounting on undergraduate and graduate programs. He has lectured in Statistics, Operational Research and Research Methods on graduate international programs with: BP Exploration, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Lloyds TSB. He is also the author of Stats Means Business (Butterworth-Heinemann) and Quantitative Methods for Business and Management (Pearson).