Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris’s Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2007) (hereafter COA) was a surprising read. I found the foreword by Gary Loveman, the CEO of Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., to be very engaging and insightful, and lifted my expectations for the chapters that followed. Indeed, the conclusion of his introduction was exceptionally relevant to the problems that policymakers, and the analysts that support them, face in the international system:

The challenge for those of who attempt to employ analytic capabilities is to ensure that they are oriented forward, where the problems are least well defined and the data is scarce, rather than backward, where the work is easy and the risk is low. Read ahead. There is much to learn. (p. xi)

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