Foreword
Book titles are quite important. Most writers spend a lot of quality time on the choice of the "name of the book". In this case, since five authors and three contributing authors were involved, one can assume that the title was chosen after a fair amount of brain storming and tinkering.
So, how should we decipher this title?
Property analysis is not a sacred garden opened by special keys Property analysis is simply a richer case of business and economics analysis. This reminder is quite useful, since, like most of the minor disciplines the Property field has had a long history of methodological nombrilism which may have been quite detrimental to its health
2. The combination of the words " Business" and "Quantitative methods" in the title could be a major turn off for most users since there is still a major reluctance to "Quantify" business decision making. This reluctance seems to be growing despite at least 30 years of force feeding through the various tertiary Business Curriculums. To proof, if you had the patience to analyse a representative sample of Business Schools programs, you would be quite surprised by the extreme rarity of "Quant stuff" by opposition to the clear over-dominance of "soft stuff". In fact, the interesting paradox is that the more modern and powerful the techniques are made available, the less quantitative becomes business education and this paradox may be explained by my last point.
3. A "spreadsheet approach" ... That is the clincher!
The title tells us something that most reader will grasp immediately: this book is not another book on statistics, applied maths and programming we all have seen zillions of such books. This new text seems to admit something crucial: most of the stuff is too hard if you try to go the traditional route (paper, pencil, calculators and maths.). The only way to have a real go at this material is to DO it. To do it in the most intuitive and now universal tool: the speadsheet format.
Spreasheets are the best answer to the basic pedagogical problem: how to play with numbers in order to understand the methods. Most of the traditional teaching of quantitative techniques was spending all the time explaining methods... demonstrating...proving... justifying. And then there was no time left to DO it ... to run the numbers... to see the results... to play with the hypothesis and parameters. In other words, it was unusable.
Now, thanks to John Flaherty, Ric Lombardo, Paul Morgan, Basil da Silva, David Wilson, William McCloskey, Richard Borst and Lloyd Williams we are a step closer to having useable instruments.
Academics and practioners should find in "A Spreadsheet Approach to Business Quantitative Methods" a mine of tools to teach and to apply in a 'laboratory' spirit instead of a 'blackboard' spirit.