A correct figure is not enough
Joining a consultancy teaches you quickly that the difficulty is not computing correctly but getting a figure accepted by a room that did not follow the computation.
I joined a data consultancy in October. After a year alone with the books the shift is sharp: what blocks is no longer the technique but the trust placed in a result. The year ahead will be made of client engagements, and therefore of rooms to convince: hence three books turned towards proof rather than the engine.
Written for journalists, useful to engineers: it treats the source, its freshness and its holes as the main subject rather than a preliminary. It is the discipline most missing from corporate dashboards.
Three authors on a flaw in judgement nobody discusses: two equally competent people, given the same file, do not decide the same thing, and the gap between them stays invisible, since only one decision is ever observed. Bias gets argued about in meetings; noise never turns up there. In committee a figure is therefore not rejected for being wrong: it is read differently by each person. The remedy is not a better slide, it is a decision rule settled before the figure is shown.
Uncomfortable and necessary when you bill by the day. Its thesis about jobs their own holders consider pointless is arguable in detail, but it poses the only question worth asking of an engagement: what would have been missing had it not happened.