Quantitative Methods for Decision Makers

As a manager, developing a good understanding of the business analysis techniques at your disposal is crucial. Understanding how and when to use them and what their results really mean can be the difference between making a good or bad decision, and, ultimately, between business success and failure.

This book covers everything you need to know for an introductory quantitative methods course and it helps you to understand why each of the methods and techniques are important by relating them directly to real-life examples where business decisions need to be made.

For this fifth edition, the book content, examples and cases have been thoroughly updated throughout. The new and improved use of colour, figures, tables and charts help to illustrate key points and make the text easier to read and understand than ever before. Other key features of this book include:

• Student Activities in every chapter (with a solutions appendix for ease of reference).
• Fully worked examples at the end of every chapter.
• Exercises are supported by real-life data sets, provided in Excel, on the book's companion website.
• QMDM in Action case studies illustrating how organisations have used and benefited from these techniques in the real world
• A chapter on financial decision-making
• An online Lecturer's Manual (including fully worked solutions to exercises in the text plus related discussion).

Quantitative Methods for Decision Makers will provide you with a detailed understanding of the role and purpose of quantitative methods in effective management and managerial decision-making. The focus on the application of these methods by public and private sector managers makes this book especially suitable for those with prior business experience and for MBA students.

The book's companion website can be found at www.pearsoned.co.uk/wisniewski

Wisniewski makes numerical and statistical concepts understandable and brings them to life using excellent scenarios and case studies. This book was a valuable resource during my MBA studies and I am encouraging all my non-statistical colleagues and anyone who works with statistics or performance measurement data to read this book! - Brian J Pickett, Assistant Director, Local Government Data Unit, Wales

Mik Wisniewski is Senior Research Fellow at Strathclyde Business School in Scotland. He also works as a freelance management consultant with clients including PriceWaterhouseCoopers, ScottishPower and Shell, and a variety of public sector organisations in the UK, across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.