Let Them Cook
No, I am not referring to contestants on Top Level Chef, nor to Walter White and Jesse. I am referring to our customers.
In Cal Newport’s latest podcast, Let Brandon Cook (episode 339), Cal dissects a comment that Brandon Sanderson, the prolific fantasy author, made during a recent conversation with Tim Ferriss on The Tim Ferriss Show (episode 794). Brandon said, “Everything in our company is built around, ‘Let Brandon cook,’ and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn’t have to think about, or doesn’t strictly need to do.”
The idea is that high-value people in an organization should be enabled to focus on their core skills (those that can create substantial value for a company), and should minimize distractions and busywork.
This concept got me thinking that many of the users of our business intelligence tools are senior executives and department heads who use KPIs to make important decisions for their companies. These people have competing priorities, are under pressure to create value quickly, and require focused time to execute.
Our BI platform delivers data from multiple systems of record in automated and easy-to-use dashboards that facilitate decision making. A benefit is that our customers no longer have to manually download data and build Excel-based reports over and over again (a process that is ripe for human error). Nothing excites us (and pains us) more than hearing that executives or managers are spending hours or even days each month manually downloading and manipulating data to update KPIs that are emailed around in spreadsheets. A Board is not paying executives to perform low-value manual tasks that can and should be automated.
BI tools are designed to improve efficiency across an organization, and one of the biggest impacts is giving people their time back - time that can be dedicated to activities that create real value for a company. That is the “cooking” Brandon Sanderson is talking about.
So the next time we implement our BI platform and give time back to our customers, we will smile and say, “Let them cook!”