DATA AT SPEED

Ramsey imports lessons learned on the racetrack to the corporate boardroom.

In his nonfiction debut, the author asserts that the lessons he’s learned while working in the business world are applicable to the world of professional track racing, and vice versa. Ramsey spent over 35 years as an analytics expert and data officer at companies like Samsung, GlaxoSmithKline, and IBM; in a startling pivot, he created a professional auto-racing team called Big Data in Action, which competed in various series. When the author moved to the racing world, he noticed striking parallels with his corporate experience, even though, as he admits, such a realization “sounds like something a marketing department would dream up after too many energy drinks.” In both worlds, the author observes, “the stakes were immediate, the feedback loops were tight, and the margin between victory and disaster was measured in tenths of a second.” Ramsey lays out five principles at the core of this confluence, starting with “Decompose Your Key Metrics Like a Driver Decomposes a Turn” (find the one component with the most variance and make it your team’s specific, measurable target) before moving on to “Predict and Monitor Your Key Resources, Not Just Your Outcomes” (the author notes that most companies he’s worked with are good at predicting outcomes, but very few monitor the resources that produce those outcomes). Ramsey follows this material with “Expand the Use of External Data for Tactical and Strategic Decisions” (per the author, if your intelligence comes from the same sources as your competition, you have no advantage) and the self-explanatory “Find Unique Data Sources That Your Competitors Have Not Discovered,” concluding with “Find New Ways To Compare Using Historical Data” (“the richest insights in historical data are often hiding not in what everyone measures, but in what nobody measures”).

Ramsey, appropriately, keeps his text lively and brisk, breaking up the chapters visually with insets and bullet points, adding eye-catching “pit board” breakdowns. (“Formula 1 shows how tiny advantages compound,” reads one such entry. “Winning is not magic; it is the relentless pursuit of small gains across every system.”) He also provides quick “Boardroom Translation” sections: “A racing team does not just measure cornering speed—they measure the gap between the corner exit and the moment the driver gets back on the throttle.” The author occasionally lapses into typical business-book cliches like “History won’t repeat exactly, but it rhymes,” but generally his insights, while at times reading as a bit fanciful, are forceful and ultimately convincing about the importance of fast, firm decision-making. Ramsey does a skillful job of interweaving his own experiences on the racetrack, which lends his narrative more excitement than corporate guidebooks tend to have: “The restart came. Green flag. I got on the throttle and tried to hold my line, knowing exactly what was about to happen.” His business-world readers will find sound lessons in these pages about the imperative of quick, decisive action in the modern data-saturated world, and surely many of them will appreciate the dramatic framing.

A readable and intriguing business book that draws parallels between the corporate and racing worlds.