BI and the "Talent Stack"

In the book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, introduced the concept of the “talent stack.” Drawing from personal experience, he found that you are more likely to find unusual success if you combine several good skills than if you try to become the top 1% in any one specific skill.

In Adams’ case, he describes himself as having a mix of decent abilities: he’s reasonably funny, a competent (but not exceptional) artist, and experienced in the corporate world from his years working at Pacific Bell. He is not world-class in any of these individual skills. There are funnier comedians, more talented artists, and more accomplished business professionals. However, by blending these skills—humor, drawing, and an insider’s understanding of office culture—he created Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time. 

So what does Dilbert have to do with Render Analytics and business intelligence? At Render Analytics, we adhere to the talent stack. We have a breadth of abilities, but we are not necessarily “world class” in any one. For example, each of us knows Power BI quite well, but we wouldn’t hold ourselves up as the leading experts in writing DAX. Mike and Jordan know a lot about Google Cloud Platform, but I’m pretty sure the employees at Google know more. I can easily argue that Corey is world class at accounting and FP&A, but he hasn’t written the definitive textbook on those topics. And we’ve been in our customers' shoes, investing in and operating middle market companies, but you’ve never read about our stories in the Wall Street Journal.

Nevertheless, the combination of our skills—accounting, finance, Power BI, data science, business operations, and communication (all of which work well together)—have given us a unique ability to help middle market companies with reporting and business intelligence.

While some of us lean more towards technology skills, and others towards finance and business operations, we encourage everyone to periodically tilt the other way in order to build a deeper personal talent stack. We have found that doing so has been good for our employees’ personal and professional growth, and it’s been great for helping our customers. When we hire, we look for people who have contributed to their former employers and customers through a combination of skills.

Perhaps in the future Render Analytics will achieve Dilbert-like success, but we don’t need that kind of outcome in order to provide outstanding service to our current and future customers. We’ll just continue to focus on the intersection of our abilities and rely on our talent stack to add value in unique ways.