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Learn how to visualize and deliver your data effectively

Persuading with Data teaches readers all the skills needed to go from data analysis to persuasive workplace communications. Written with an accessible style and a focus on practical skills, it provides a single resource for the best practices in data visualization, slide design, logical structure, persuasive argument, and presentation delivery. With exercises and supplemental materials, this guide can also serve as the primary text for any class aimed at teaching professionals how to communicate analytical results in the workplace.

Learn how to use your data to persuade others with clarity, not complexity.

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Art Direction + Design by Candance Hope and Liz Moran Design

About
the Book

An integrated introduction to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices.

Author, entrepreneur, and MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Miro Kazakoff provides an integrated instructional guide to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Most books on data visualization focus on creating good graphs. This is the first book that combines both explanatory visualization and communication strategy, showing how to use visuals to create effective communications that convince an audience to accept and act on the data. In four parts that proceed from micro to macro, the book explains how our brains make sense of graphs; how to design effective graphs and slides that support your ideas; how to organize those ideas into a compelling presentation; and how to deliver and defend data to an audience.

Persuading with Data is for anyone who has to explain analytical results to others. It synthesizes a wide range of skills needed by modern data professionals, providing a complete toolkit for creating effective business communications. Readers will learn how to simplify in order to amplify, how to communicate data analysis, how to prepare for audience resistance, and much more. The book integrates practitioner and academic perspectives with real-world examples from a variety of industries, organizations, and disciplines. It is accessible to a wide range of readers—from undergraduates to mid-career and executive-level professionals—and has been tested in settings that include academic classes and workplace training sessions.

Key Features

  • Addresses both explanatory visualization and communication strategy

    Most data visualization books focus exclusively on creating good graphs. This book brings the focus back to how you can use those visuals to create effective communications that persuade others to take actions informed by the data. It will equip you with the frameworks and principles to structure your thinking clearly, identify the implications that emerge, design effective data visualizations, deliver them to an audience, and defend your results.

  • Integrates both a practitioner and academic perspective

    The book brings together an analytical, practical, and academic perspective on communication. After studying English and Computer Science, the author spent over a decade in the technology industry communicating technical information to non-technical audiences at companies like WPP, Bain & Company, and Hubspot. Since 2013, he has taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management testing the tools discussed in the book in both the classroom and the workplace.

  • Supports readers with different backgrounds

    The content has been tested across a wide variety of formats and audiences, including academic classes and workplace training with undergraduates, recent graduates, early career, mid-career, and executive-level professionals. It is appropriate for readers with no prior background beyond an introductory business education or general work experience while still being useful for those with decades of experience. The frameworks and concepts have been refined for clarity and efficacy based on extensive feedback. They are reliably useful and accessible to a broad range of business professionals.

  • Incorporates real-world examples

    The book incorporates real-world examples drawn from hundreds of professionals and tested with audiences ranging from undergraduates to working professionals. The examples span a variety of industries, organizations, and disciplines and show how the frameworks in this book apply to a wide variety of audiences.

  • Includes supplemental teaching materials

    The supplemental lesson plans, slides, and answer keys and grading rubrics associated with the text allow for the turnkey creation of an entire college-level class. The support material has been used to train multiple faculty members with limited background in data visualization to deliver high-quality student experiences. Each chapter includes an exercise that encourages readers to apply what they have learned. Solution guides, sample syllabi, lesson plans, sample assignments, and additional exercises are all available for instructors.

    Request an exam copy and access to the supplemental material ➝

Opportunities for Your Organization

  • Workshops

    Miro leads workshops for organizations that want to help professionals better communicate about data and analytical results.

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  • Speaking

    Miro speaks to professionals about what individuals can do to make data more persuasive.

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Praise for the Book

 

“Turning data into charts and graphs—and clearly stating their insights—is a bit of an art form. It demands not just analytical skill but also a sense of drama in presenting the insights. Miro Kazakoff has put together a very fine guide to keep you from boring your audience to death.”

Barbara Minto

Author of The Minto Pyramid Principle

“This book is two books in one! Kazakoff provides all the best practices of data visualization and marries these with the best practices of business communication to provide truly timely, relevant, and valuable content for anyone who wants to get the most impact out of their data.”

Kerrie Aman Carfagno

Associate Professor of Management Communication, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia

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Book Exercises + Resources

Persuading with Data comes with an entire suite of supplemental teaching materials and resources designed for use in any business classroom. They are based on the author’s experience teaching this material to undergraduates, MBAs, business analytics students, and later-career professionals. Access to the teaching guides and material can be requested from MIT Press.

These resources should provide you with everything you need to deliver a complete class and, ultimately, help you create a class that is engaging for both the students and the instructor alike.

Request a free exam copy and receive access to the end-of-chapter exercises from MIT Press

Additional teaching materials are available through this site and updated regularly

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MEET THE AUTHOR

Miro Kazakoff

I am an author, entrepreneur, and Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management where I focus on how individuals use data to persuade others.

At MIT Sloan, I developed all of the school’s Communicating and Persuading With Data courses which help individuals improve their ability to persuade by speaking, writing, and visualizing data more effectively. The students of MIT Sloan recognized me as the Sloan Teacher of the Year in 2020, and I have twice been named one of MIT’s Teaching with Digital Technology Fellows.

Though my teaching career I have taught students with a variety of experience levels. In addition to working with organizations to improve the skills of working professionals, I have taught courses to MIT’s undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, Sloan Fellow, and Executive Education students.

MIT Press published my first textbook Persuading with Data in March 2022.

Before joining the faculty at MIT, I co-founded Testive, an education technology company that combined an adaptive online learning platform with live human coaching to help students meet their educational goals. Prior to that, I worked in a variety of sales and client service roles at Hubspot, Compete.com (sold to media conglomerate WPP), and Bain & Co.

I hold a BA from Georgetown University where I studied English and Computer Science and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.