Holiday shopping guide for analytic foodies.

(Part of the "Analytics Is Eating the World" series, an insider’s advice on data and analytics for CEOs, boards, and general managers. Featuring food metaphors.)

An economist’s 1993 paper estimated that holiday gift-giving burns up to $13 billion per year in deadweight loss, as kind-hearted people buy products that beneficiaries value less than the money spent. There are nonetheless plenty of reasons to continue the gift-giving tradition. The trick is to focus on gifts that may present asymmetric upside for the recipient, generally by making them aware of something new that the giver has personally tried and loved.

If your recipient is an analytics enthusiast, that may be a daunting task. Who knows what these people enjoy? I mean, besides the timeless pleasures of life: taking a walk along a secluded beach at sunset, watching an A/B test confirm a counterintuitive hypothesis, interacting with a particularly colorful data visualization…but I digress.

Perhaps you are the analytics enthusiast, looking to treat yourself after a hard autumn of fighting with the CFO over next year’s data budget. Let’s go with that scenario.

Below I’ve set out a list of thought-provoking books for your holiday reading enjoyment, grouped by level of intensity to meet you wherever you are on your data-and-analytics journey. In keeping with the rules of this series, each book is paired with a food-related item. You’ll notice that some of the books are decades old, but I assure you they have aged like a fine cheddar.

(In an attempt to avoid the ignominious burial that this platform gives to content that dares to link to too many outside domains, I’ve omitted links to the relevant product websites. Shopping is just one search away these days—or less than one, now that ads chase you around the internet like Pepé Le Pew—so you should be able to find what you need, but if you want convenient links to buy what you see here, switch to the version of this article on my site.)

Gifts for those setting out on the analytics journey

In the early stages of an analytics program, you should be grazing on books that are on point but hail from outside your industry. The idea is to get inspired by unusual ways that people have used data to answer hard questions. Two books provide insights from deeply personal data sets that reveal hidden truths.

Dataclysm: OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder wrote this book in 2014, delivering his magnum opus shortly before leaving the business entirely. It’s been an eventful five years for everyone, and content about intimate relationships has become a bit risqué for our evolving tastes, but I think you can handle it. Rudder mines anonymized data from the courtship behaviors of 10 million users to understand who is attracted to whom and why.

Dataclysm pairs nicely with Eaton Hemp pink Himalayan salt hemp seeds, which are deliciously crunchy and salty. Hemp seeds contain no THC or CBD, so they’re completely legal, non-intoxicating, and not exactly addictive, though it’s hard to eat less than a full bag.

Everybody Lies: Ex-Googler Seth Stephens-Davidowitz published this book in 2017 to show how to use one of my favorite tools, Google Trends, to uncover the hidden preferences of different populations of people. I recommend this data source not only because of its flexibility but also because of the enormous size of the population involved and the fact that these searches really do seem to reflect something unfakably honest about people’s interests, hopes, and fears.

The book’s policy recommendations should be taken with a jar of Newfoundland Salt Company juniper-smoked sea salt. Even if you don’t have a grill, you can use this condiment to add a pleasant, smoky flavor to your food while maintaining plausible deniability. Let your salt do the lying for you.

Gifts for those who have analytics pilots up and running

If you’re overseeing analytics for a largish company, you may become aware of scattered teams that are separately trying to buy the exact same data sets, or tackling similar problems with completely different systems. This is when you need to decide how much to standardize and apply top-down controls at the risk of stifling innovation and business autonomy. Two books sit on opposite sides of the debate.

The Box: Marc Levinson’s 2006 book is a case study that will make you cheer for standardization. Container shipping is now a multi-trillion-dollar business thanks to the relentless efforts of Malcolm McLean (whom Forbes called “one of the few men who changed the world”) in persuading industries and governments to adopt standard dimensions for shipping containers. It didn’t come easy.

While reading The Box you should nibble on a Michel Cluizel Grand Noir 85% chocolate bar. Theobroma cacao is a fussy plant, besieged by pests, and it’s unreasonable to expect every bar to taste the same as the last one. Somehow, Cluizel pulls it off, producing a bar that is naturally low in sugar and consistently smooth, bitter, and delicious. And it probably came to you via a shipping container.

The Evolution of Everything: The other side of the standardization argument is best laid out by science journalist Matt Ridley, whose 2015 book argues that we need much less governance in the world, as most good things arise bottom-up from spontaneous order. Ridley shares examples from language, technology, music, religion, and more. Who needs burdensome top-down standards when selection pressures are driving people in more or less the right direction?

You can pair this book with an Aerogarden Harvest Elite Slim. As discussed in Rule 7, you can now start a farm in a very small indoor space and watch tendrils sprout from their capsules and follow ancient orders to curl into different herbs or vegetables, bringing spontaneous order to your very own home.

Boss-level gifts for those who have got it all figured out

A lucky few organizations use analytics as a competitive differentiator. Here are two books that get to more subtle questions about the mission of your analytics effort, and how to generate real innovations that are more than just incremental.

The Elephant in the Brain: Robin Hanson and writer Kevin Simler compiled in 2018 the many ways in which mysteries of human behavior are best explained by signaling: people trying to show off some high-status fact about themselves, such as affiliation with a powerful group.  Companies (and smaller organizational units) that are prominently running transformations to become world-class in analytics should ask themselves if they are mostly doing science, or if instead they’re mostly signaling to rival coalitions, current and future employees, regulators, and other stakeholders.

Read this book while sipping Aberlour A’bunadh: a cask-strength, sherry-aged whisky released in limited-run batches. It happens to be very tasty, but its salient feature here is that each batch is numbered, so you can get extra status points by telling everyone about the particular number you like.

Impro: In 1979, director Keith Johnstone wrote the definitive work on spontaneity, recounting exercises from his theater classes that removed obstacles from his students’ minds to get them to be better improvisers. As far as I can tell, this book was not written as an allegory for business people. But it’s popular among analytical types for such feats as taking the idea of social status (nearly four decades before Simler and Hanson’s book), twisting it around, and using it to drive the creative process in role-playing.

This book pairs with the Breville Fast-Slow Pro, which, in its pressure-cooking “fast” mode, enables improvisational experimentation by providing rapid feedback. In the slow mode you can make forgiving recipes such as bone broth, and nobody will know what you put in there.

But there is one gift that goes with everything and creates zero deadweight loss: a subscription to a free food-and-analytics blog.

This article first appeared on the Braff & Company blog at braff.co. Subscribe for automatic updates.