As the subtitle suggests, Gam and Bernado have written a book about data for people who don’t want to read about data!

In today’s businesses, the data you sit on is your greatest asset - data you collect from your people, your customers, your suppliers - data you collect yourself or through your partners or third party sources.

The challenge for senior executives, without a deep data background, is to understand the potential of this data, and how it can be used to drive insights of value to their company, to their people, and to their customers.

Over 200 pages the authors lead you through 52 playbooks - which sounds like a lot until you see that each is just a page or two long.

Each play provides a story or example from the real world, and then asks you how you might apply that concept with a data mindset.

One of my favourite examples is a story about the rock band Van Halen including in their rider that they couldn’t have any brown M&Ms in the backstage area - meaning some poor soul had to remove them from the bowls they requested!

At first you might think this is rock band excess, but when you dig deeper you find that the band were touring with one of the most complex and dangerous set designs and the M&Ms clause was a trigger phrase.

They buried the request for no brown M&Ms in the middle of their contract, and when they turned up at a new stadium the first thing they would do is check the M&Ms.

If there were brown ones in the bowl it meant the promoter had not read the contract properly and therefore the crew did a deep assessment of the set that had been put up to check for safety issues.

The authors then challenge you to think about how you might use a similar data ‘trigger’ in your own business to look for risks.

All 52 of these plays will take you no more than a day to read, but provide valuable inspiration and ideas for looking at the data in your own business without needing to be a data engineer.

Highly recommended.