I was delighted to sit down with our investor Allison Pickens to talk about what we do at Parable, and why we think it matters. Our conversation ranged from leadership and management practices and employee engagement to physics.
At the core of Parable is our conviction that time is our most precious resource.
Many people understand this at a conceptual level, especially when it comes to personal time. Elizabeth I, who sat on the English throne from 1558 to 1603, and who “elevated England to such a degree of wealth … that her throne appeared to sit at the center of the world” according to 19th-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, famously said she would give "all my possessions for a moment of time" on her deathbed. Though time can be a rather esoteric notion, what we do with our time defines who we are.
This applies to the workplace, and has implications for both individuals, and companies at large.
At an individual level, many of the highest performers we’ve interviewed – from CEOs to executives to top performing engineers – think deeply about time. And they often have developed individual homespun systems to measure their time, and focus it on work that matters most.
But despite a Cambrian explosion in productivity tools, we’ve found few managers that think about time at a collective, systems level.
When you have 5,000 employees, how do you see their collective time as a shared, fungible resource? How do you make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction, with the appropriate amount of force? How do you fight entropy and keep teams tightly aligned with your goals?
Before the advent of AI, this was an impossible problem to solve. Today, however, we can interpret the large data trail left by every company in the world, which paints a holistic and complete picture of where and how collective time is invested. We can do that while preserving the privacy of individuals, and ensuring every team has the insight it needs to align its most precious resource – its team members’ time – with the overall strategy.
Reach out if you want to learn more, or listen to this conversation with Allison: https://allisonpickens.substack.com/p/mastering-company-alignment-how-to
