Every so often, one of the co-hosts of this podcast co-authors a book. And by “every so often” we mean “it’s happened once so far.” Tim, along with (multi-)past guest Dr. Joe Sutherland, just published Analytics the Right Way: A Business Leader’s Guide to Putting Data to Productive Use, and we got to sit them down for a chat about it! From misconceptions about data to the potential outcomes framework to economists as the butt of a joke about the absolute objectivity of data (spoiler: data is not objective), we covered a lot of ground. Even accounting for our (understandable) bias on the matter, we thought the book was a great read, and we think this discussion about some of the highlights will have you agreeing! Order now before it sells out!

Links to Items Mentioned in the Show

• One last plug: Buy the book!


• (Podcast) Experiment Nation: Build a Learning Library featuring Nick Murphy


• (Workforce development outreach tour) AI + You


• (Blog) Compound Pejoratives on Reddit – from Buttface to Wankpuffin by Colin Morris

Episode Transcript

0:00:05 .8 Announcer: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.

0:00:13 .7 Val Kroll: Hey everyone, and welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 263 and I’m Val Kroll from facts & feelings. You know, writing can be hard. While I am absolutely just opening the show with some totally off the cuff extemporaneous remarks, it’s not hard at all for me to imagine a world where the intro that we do for every episode is carefully written out ahead of time. But that definitely wasn’t done here. Nope, I’m totally freestyling and free associating. And that’s how this Tim style rambling I’m doing, which just happens to be the topic of writing, is a nice transition to what this episode is all about. It’s a first for the Analytics Power Hour. And no, I don’t mean because it’s the first time I’ve done the show opening. It’s because we’ve secured an exclusive designation as the official podcast for what is sure to be the most talked about analytics book of 2025. The book, you might ask, analytics the Right Way. Or the full title, analytics the Right Way, A Business Leader’s Guide to Putting Data to Productive Use. I’m joined today by Julie Hoyer from Further for this discussion. Julie, are you excited to talk with these book authors?

0:01:24 .7 Julie Hoyer: Oh my gosh, absolutely. Have been waiting for this all what, month?

0:01:32 .5 VK: Very nice. I’m also joined by Tim Wilson, my colleague from facts & feelings. And he’s more of a guest today than a co-host because he’s one of the co-authors of the book. Tim, welcome to the show, I guess.

0:01:45 .4 Tim Wilson: Hopefully this is the last time we’ll use this little gimmick, maybe.

0:01:49 .7 VK: We’ll stop doing cool shit. We won’t have you on as a guest. How about that? No, never. You’d never. And we’re joined by Tim’s co-author, Dr. Joe Sutherland. In addition to working with corporate executives as a consultant and advisor, Joe founded the center for AI Learning at Emory University where he also teaches. And as it happens, Julie and I both got to be his students in a way when we worked with him together at Search Discovery. Now, Further, Joe has a list of credentials that is, frankly, kind of intimidating. Let’s see if I can get through it. He has one political science degree from Washington University in St. Louis and three more, including a couple of doctorates from Columbia. He’s a fellow at The Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washoe. He worked in the Obama White House from 2011 to 2013. Casual. He published academic papers all over the place. He’s been on this podcast three times now, believe it or not.

0:02:50 .2 TW: That’s an accomplishment.

0:02:51 .9 VK: Sure is. Yeah. But intimidating. Not really. If you know Joe, he’s not scary at all. Today we get to welcome him as our guest. Welcome to the show, Dr. Joe.

0:03:01 .9 Joe Sutherland: Thank you very much. It’s good to be back. That’s the reason we wrote the book, actually, was because Tim dangled the podcast appearance and he said, “hey, you’ll actually… ”

0:03:13 .0 TW: All he had to do. You’ll let me on as a guest.

0:03:15 .3 VK: I love it.

0:03:16 .1 TW: I just need to bring somebody with some real credentials. That was the…

0:03:19 .8 VK: Yeah, that’s the hook. Yeah. I love it. So excited for this one. So I guess a good place to start would be asking you guys just a little bit about how this book came to be. I know you guys worked together at Search Discovery ’cause I was there to see it, had the privilege to see it. But this didn’t come together till a few years later. So I’m curious, kind of how it started. A little bit of the origin story. And what did you guys see that was not out there in the space that you wanted to kind of address with analytics the right way?

0:03:50 .0 JS: That is a great question. I actually have a specific memory of when this book, like, hatched in my mind, which is I was, like, on my back patio on the phone with Tim. This is, like, years ago. And I think one of us just goes, we should write a book. And I mean, it’s true.

0:04:08 .9 VK: Simple as that.

0:04:10 .0 JS: And the truth is, like, I do think we’re ideologically aligned in so many ways when it comes to, like, the practice of data and analysis and machine learning and artificial, all these things that you hear about today. And I just knew that by coming together with Tim, something wonderful would be made. And where where it went to, right, Was I get a lot of these customers, clients, or folks I guess I encounter a lot of them at the center all the time who go, I’m ready for AI. Can I get into it right now? Let me just buy it. Let’s do it. And they never ask the question like, “well, what are you actually trying to achieve? And how do we get there first? And do you even have the data availability? Have you thought through where your investments need to go?” And I actually think that the principles behind making our way towards these artificial intelligence projects and capabilities at companies which are truly transformational, the principles are universal. I mean, you can really link them back to any data or analytics question. And I wanted to give the corporate executives of the world and any sort of business leader. I wanted to give them a book that would basically say, hey look, read this and, or give it to your people, have them read it right and you’ll get there. That’s kind of what I was hoping to get out of it when we started.

0:05:28 .3 JH: And that’s no small like task either. That is a lofty goal.

0:05:33 .9 TW: Well, I mean, I think part of what happened, Joe and I met like he was thinking about like the introduction happened. I remember sitting in Atlanta in a conference room, me thinking, this guy’s gonna make me feel stupid. We hit it off and then as we work together, I have some very clear memories of sort of having an expectation than when you bring in a data scientist. And that’s kind of what Joe’s sort of the role, the branding he was, we were using for him at the time was data scientist. And I had gone through this journey on my own where I was going to try to become a data scientist like a few years before and kind of realized after a few years like, no, I can do really useful stuff, but I’m not really going to be ever something that I would consider a data scientist. But I had this expectation that when you talk to a data scientist, they’re going to start immediately talking about models and methods and you know, the vast quantities of data and the number of times that Joe would get brought in and there would be somebody, we want to do an X, we want to do AI, we want to do machine learning, we want to build a model that.

0:06:43 .2 TW: And he very consistently would say, wait a minute, like we first have to define the problem, we have to frame the proble