Interview With Author Nick Valiotti
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I have spent more than fifteen years in analytics, with a PhD in neural-network prediction from Georgia Tech. Before I ever consulted, I built data practices inside big-box retail and telecom, and in 2019 I started my own firm. Today I work as a fractional Chief Data Officer, which means I run the data function for growing companies without them hiring a full-time executive to do it. Your Fractional CDO is my first book. It came out of noticing that the same conversations kept repeating across dozens of engagements, and that most of what leaders needed had never been written down in one place.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
It is called Your Fractional CDO: The Essential Guide to Data and Analytics for Modern Leaders. The inspiration was watching capable founders hit the same wall. Their business had outgrown spreadsheets, but the next step was a fog of unfamiliar terms and expensive tools, and nobody had explained how any of it fit together. I wanted to write the book I wish I could have handed every executive on day one of an engagement, something that treats data as a business decision rather than a technical one.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I do not really write like an author. I write like I am in a meeting. Most chapters started as an explanation I had given a client out loud, so I would draft by picturing one specific frustrated executive across the table and writing until that person would stop me and say, alright, now I get it. If a paragraph could not survive that test, it did not stay in the book.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
The books that shaped me most are not about data at all, they are about how to run a service business well. David Maister’s Managing the Professional Service Firm is the one I keep going back to. It is decades old and still describes my world more accurately than almost anything written last year, because the hard part of consulting was never the technical work, it was the trust. Mike Michalowicz’s The Pumpkin Plan taught me the discipline of pruning, choosing the few clients and problems worth going deep on and letting the rest go. That idea sits underneath my own book. The answer is almost never to do more.
What are you working on now?
Most of my time goes to the consulting practice, running the data function for a handful of growing companies at any given moment. Alongside that I have been building a tool that audits a company’s analytics setup and shows them what is actually working and what is quietly costing them, which grew directly out of the patterns in the book. I am also turning more of what I teach one-on-one into formats that can reach people I will never get to work with directly.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Honestly, the best promotion has been giving the ideas away. I write consistently on LinkedIn and in a newsletter, and I do not gate the useful part behind a purchase. When someone reads a post that solves a real problem for them, the book becomes the obvious next step rather than a pitch. Platforms come and go, but that trade of value for attention has never stopped working for me.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write the book only you could write. The market does not need another summary of things already sitting in a hundred blog posts, it needs the specific pattern you have seen that nobody else has. And finish it. A flawed book that exists will always beat the perfect one still living in your head.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Oddly, it came from a book I did not even love. Dave Crenshaw’s The Myth of Multitasking is a small idea stretched a little thin, but the core of it has never left me. There is no such thing as multitasking, only switching, and switching costs far more than it feels like it does. Once you accept that, you stop admiring busyness and start protecting focus. It is the same instinct behind everything I tell clients about their data. Doing fewer things properly beats doing everything at once.
What are you reading now?
Right now it is Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. It is one of those books people call a classic so often that you almost skip it, and then you read it and understand why. His whole argument is that effectiveness comes from decisions, not activity, which is exactly the case I try to make about data. The point was never to produce more reports, it was to make the one decision that actually moves the business.
What’s next for you as a writer?
The first book is deliberately broad, a map of the whole territory. What is pulling at me next is going deep on one part of it, probably the organizational side, how you actually build and structure a data team without over-hiring. That is where I watch companies make the most expensive mistakes, and it deserves a book of its own.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
I would start with David Maister’s Managing the Professional Service Firm, because it is the one book I reread and find something new in every time, and the island would finally give me the hours for it. I would bring Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive for the same reason, timeless enough to hold up on a tenth reading. I would also pack Goldratt’s The Goal, partly because I have been meaning to get to it and partly because it hides real operational thinking inside an actual story, which is exactly what you want when there is nothing else to do. And if a fourth is allowed, Michalowicz’s The Pumpkin Plan, to keep me plotting the business I would rebuild the moment someone came to rescue me.
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