The Effective Statistician - in association with PSI

Olaf has a really interesting character. He is an IT guy and he went up through the ranks of different companies, had a great career and learned quite a lot about leadership. He was applying a lot of these learnings and now he's training others in that regard as he has his very own leadership program. I'm a participant and have benefited a lot. One day, we agreed to discuss the 4 pillars of boosti...

What is Statistical Engineering (SE)? How did the idea of Statistical Engineering come about? Is SE an idea and a practice, or is it a profession, or both?  How does SE compare to the role/profession of “statistician” and/or “data scientist”?

Today, I have an interview with Margaret Gamalo, about how to combine a controlled arm with real world evidence data, a really hot topic. Also, Margaret has been sharing her knowledge for a long time and has gained lots of opportunities this way. Helping others will help you in the long-run. We discuss this aspect in the episode as well.

Are you overwhelmed by work? Do you feel like being constantly under time pressure? As I’m talking with colleagues in nearly all organizations, there seems to be an overall increase in workload, shorter timelines, a reduced number of people to help, and also an increase in complexity of the projects.  This leads to the breakdown of the system. There’s some interesting research by a German mathemat...

Do you want to help someone improve their visualization skills? Or do you want to train others on any other statistics skills? Training is a very important topic for us statisticians. We train people all the time it can be about statistics or non-statistics.

Is it possible to align business focus and self development at the same time? How can we create clear department or company goals or relate these to our goals? In this episode, Benjamin talk about how to make business focus and self development work together. We also provide you numerous tips on how to make it work.

While we go through our career, we have lots of days that are more or less similar: meetings, discussions, and emails. But sometimes there are spotlight moments. You can be in a meeting with various senior people or work with new clients that is really critical. You have a meeting that will make it or break it. Very often these kind of meetings come with some kind of warning. You e.g. know you nee...

What is a statistical unicorn? What should we be doing to become one? Gary Sullivan introduced me to Ena and she's a really interesting statistician. She was actually quite ahead of her time when she founded her CRO.

What are the limitations and strength of introverts in negotiations? What does listening really mean and why is it important for negotiations? How do to handle different emotions during negotiations or emotional hijack? How to extract intel from without being obvious? It is important to be an effective negotiator as negotiation is all around us all the time. Whether it's about daily life or making...

What is Dark Data? What inspired David to write this book?  What did he hope to accomplish in its writing? Today, we all make decisions using data. Dark Data shows us all how to reduce the risk of making bad ones.

How does data visualization work for journalism? What can we learn from it as statisticians? Today, we will be talking about data visualization in journalism with Irene. She has worked for BBC so she has a background with journalism and we will learn from her perspective.

Are you looking for a promotion or a higher salary? What are the processes to grant these kind of requests? Can you ask for this right away or is there a specific timing? When I started my career, I had no clue about this topic so I made a lot of mistakes and learned it the hard way. The right approach to this depends on number of things. One is considering the size of your company. If you are in...

What is a good or bad strategy? What is the difference between strategy and goals? Has strategy something to do with vision or long-term thinking?

What is due diligence? Why do you need a statistician in it?

Afraid of speaking up? Afraid of talking to senior management? Afraid of giving a presentation?  Afraid of speaking to someone new? Then you are definitively not alone. Many supervisor worry about their staff not speaking up and I have come across even senior statisticians, who are very uncomfortable about doing a pre-recorded interview for the podcast.

How do you create and teach effective and moving content that your audience will pay attention to and add great value to them? Teaching is really important to us statisticians because we need to explain stats and data all the time to our colleagues, within stats or outside stats.

Is having a mentor really beneficial? What is Manatee Mentor? What are its key features? How can this predict your professional success? Manatee Mentor is an AI-powered platform to make mentoring inclusive, affordable and accessible to all. It can match or unmatch with your mentor and mentee through its constantly learning AI algorithm. You can choose your topic of mentoring, preferences, and find...

What is the data project? Why are data management programs a strategic imperative? Why do they fail? Usually a data management project starts with a change of perspective in the organisation, especially from senior leaders. To make such a project happen, data leaders must be familiar with the principles of change management, learn to speak the language of business, and be excellent listeners to cr...

You may think that QR codes aren't new. But it's actually quite something new in our field. We as statisticians, should not just leave the use of QR code to other functions such as medical writing. Instead, let's leverage this tool to have an impact and improve our output.

Today, we have a special guest, Shanti. Learn while she shares with us her vast experience in the pharmaceutical industry collected over 25 years. She held various positions inside and outside of statistics organization.

When I started my career as a statistician in the clinical world, I was wondering about safety analysis. I thought it's always the same - count the patients with an event - job done! Then just repeat. But it's not that simple, especially in more complex situation where you have different follow-up times. Then the patients that stay longer on treatment as they benefit from it, also get more adverse...

Why spend part of your career in non-clinical statistics? What are the advantages? What is the importance of having a variety of tools?

R versus SAS - which is a better tool? Today, we talk about a controversial topic. If you go online and look into social media, you'll find a lot of data scientists that talk about R versus Python. In medical and clinical research, it's more about R versus SAS. For this discussion, we have Sam Gardner and Thomas Neitmann representing SAS and R, respectively.