Professor:
Michael Taousakis
Required Reading:
Cooper, D. R., & Schindler, P. S. (2003). Business research methods (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Emery, D. R., Finnerty, J. D., & Stowe, J. D. (2007). Corporate financial management (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Horngren, C. T., Sundem, G. L., Stratton, W. O., Burgstahler, D., & Schatzberg, J. (2008). Introduction to management accounting (14th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Lind, D. A., Marchal, W. G., & Wathen, S. A. (2005). Statistical techniques in business and economics (12th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
McConnell, C. R. & Brue, S. L. (2005). Economics: Principles, problems, and policies (16th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Marshall, D. H., McManus, W. W., & Viele, D. F. (2004). Accounting: What the numbers mean. (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sevilla, A., & Somers, K. (2007). Quantitative reasoning: Tools for today’s informed citizen. Emeryville, CA: Key College Publishing.
Ancillary Reading:
Comm, J. (2009). Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. New York, NY: Wiley. [Link]
Quantitative Reasoning for Business was a head dunk into math, algebra, and an introduction to statistics after a 20 year sojourn. Mr. Taousakis made what I’m sure would have been an unbearable nightmare, a very interesting delve into the how and why of the numbers game. Each exercise was easy to link to a business need. No one ever had to ask “yea, but when will I ever need to know this?!” The answer was clear every step of the way.
Numbers are the leaderboard of a company. Return on investment is probably the most common quantitative reasoning tool that I see ignored in the marketplace today (decorum prevents me from mentioning), and also one of the most taken advantage of (think PDF eBooks, almost infinite return on investment). Quantitative Reasoning is basically the favorite boardroom saying, “What gets measured, gets done”. If you have a business, or are in a business, and aren’t tracking your sales, your cases per manhour, your warranty claims, your accidents, etc, you will never see the end coming.
One reason I love my experience in IT is being a tool to people smarter than I who ask to see reports because they want to look at data in new ways. I’ve learned more about business from writing SQL queries full of complex formulations for quantitative reasoning, than any book or lecture ever imparted.
I was very glad to be a part of this excellent team for this class. Katie Stevenson was able to help obtain mountains of data for some of the statistical analysis, and Daniel Lagos‘ experience from his mergers and acquisitions business helped explain real world examples of the subjects and his creative mind helped us look to new ways to interpret our data.