Statistics for management

Statistics for management turns data into decisions: summarising what happened, measuring spread and shape, estimating probabilities, and designing samples that represent a population. The centre of a dataset is described by mean (average), median (middle value) and mode (most frequent value); spread by range, variance and standard deviation; shape by skewness (asymmetry). Worked example: the values 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 have mean 30 (150/5), median 30 and no mode — but add one extreme value, 500, and the mean jumps to 108 while the median stays 35, showing why the median resists outliers and the mean does not. Managers choose the measure that fits the decision, not just the one that is easiest.