The Blind Spot
Over the past few months we interviewed over 100 C-Suite leaders about their organizations’ most valuable asset: their time. What we learned was fascinating. While every single executive told us they think about resource allocation and velocity every day, none of them manage their company’s time with the same precision that they do their capital. Time is a blindspot for every team.
We believe this is because time is still invisible.
Despite the plethora of productivity tools on the market, this data gap is why the executives we spoke to struggle to make their teams more effective.
A piece in HBR explained just how precious time is, and how often it’s squandered in the workplace: “Most companies have no clear understanding of how their leaders and employees are spending their collective time.”
How leaders and employees are spending their collective time is one of the last remaining data gaps in organizations.
Every time a data gap closes, we go through a paradigm-shifting moment in understanding, and subsequently upgrade how we run companies.
In the Mad Men era of marketing, CEOs knew 50% of their marketing budget was working, but they didn’t know which half. Then, Google Analytics opened the door to track conversion on ad spend and today, every CEO knows exactly how their marketing dollars convert.
Over the last few decades, technology has propagated in every single area of business, offering new data – and new insight. With AI, we can now close this data gap – leveraging the data your company already produces across your workplace stack, we can help you understand exactly where and how this key resource – your team’s collective time – is invested.
Introducing: The P&L of Time
To deliver this insight, we are building the P&L of company time – a dynamic dashboard that contextualizes and visualizes your team’s collective time so it can be invested in your organization’s most impactful priorities.
If, for example, your top strategic initiatives next year are to reduce churn and launch new markets, Parable shows you how much time you’re spending on these initiatives relative to everything else happening across your organization. We will also show you what gets in the way of delivering on this planned work – and what shows up as unplanned work.
Parable can then layer your payroll data over your time data to quantify the true cost of a project so you can know with precision how much opex you’re investing across each goal.
You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure
We believe closing this data gap will create a before and after moment in how companies manage their scarcest and most valuable asset. As Peter Drucker famously said: “You can't manage what you don't measure.” If you’re as obsessed with this topic as we are, we’d love to hear your thoughts!
~ Adam, Alex, Clint, Steve
