Job Architecture

Introduction: Wasting Our Most Precious Resource

My first job after graduating with my PhD in economics was at IBM in 2015. I had considered pursuing a path that was more typical for people with my background—finance or consulting—but I thought that, as an economist, I should see how goods and services get made in the real world.

I was hired as a data scientist in IBM's Chief Analytics Office. This team essentially served as an internal consulting team, in that we were “hired” by other IBM teams to help them solve problems or answer questions using data. The team supported things like risk modeling, sales channel optimization, marketing analytics, and revenue forecasting.

I had a labor economics background, so I was going to work specifically on IBM's people analytics, in which we used data about the internal workforce to model and analyze employee trends. I was excited to join this team because IBM had a reputation as a leader in the relatively new field of people analytics.

On my first day of the job, the director of the Chief Analytics Office pulled me into his office and told me something that would change the course of my career.

He sat me down and told me why the stakes of this team's work were so high. He said that if you took the entire IBM budget and pulled out the total amount of money spent on people, this would make up about two‐thirds of the company budget. Yet, despite employees being the overwhelming majority of costs, the company understood little about how ...