6 Lessons IT Leaders Can Learn From Top Executive Chefs
C-suite IT leaders can learn from top restaurant chefs. Sound fishy? 🐟 Read this month's article for Dataiku!
C-Suite leaders looking to learn how high-performing companies harness AI can learn from top restaurant chefs. Sound fishy? 🐟 My recent article for Dataiku with co-author Ren Lee explores six lessons IT leaders can learn from the best commercial chefs in the world, including:
1️⃣ COOK UP A CLEAR VISION. Great restaurants start with a vision of how cuisine fulfills a unique, delicious, innovative dining experience. The same goes for AI. Like great chefs, great IT leaders begin with a business-driven, opinionated vision.
2️⃣ SOURCE FRESH (DATA) INGREDIENTS. Great chefs obsess over ingredients. Similarly, innovative IT leaders obsess over innovative data ingredients. For example, many firms leave customer conversation data unprocessed and unexplored, even though audio transcription services are simple and inexpensive. With new generative AI capabilities, fresh ingredients like transcribed customer conversations are a new, essential source of new insights.
3️⃣ ORGANIZE TEAMS LIKE A CHEF ORGANIZES A KITCHEN. Great chefs obsess over preparation, process, quality, timing, repeatability, and safety; great IT leaders do the same.
4️⃣ CHECK QUALITY "AT THE PASS." One bad meal at a restaurant is a disaster. The same is true of AI. Great chefs trust their teams but verify the final result "at the pass" to ensure exacting quality. For example, research shows high-performing IT leaders are six times more likely to have sophisticated AI monitoring systems.
5️⃣ CHOOSE TOOLS WISELY AND KEEP THEM SHARP. High-quality equipment allows chefs to focus on the work, and keeping those tools clean and sharp is job one in a kitchen. Top-performing IT leaders make a similar commitment to their tools.
6️⃣ COLLABORATE LIKE A CHEF. Great chefs experiment continuously, play, gain inspiration from surprising places, and play, play, play. Great IT leaders engage their teams and colleagues and play, play, play, too!
Read the full blog post on the Dataiku blog now!
Like this? Read my favorite Substacks here:
by Michael Spencer ~ Gary Marcus of Marcus on AI ~ Last Week in AI ~ Polymathic Being by Michael Woudenberg ~ The Algorithmic Bridge by Alberto Romero ~ The Muse by Birgitte Rasine ~ The Intrinsic Perspective by Erik Hoel ~ The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz and Mike O’Toole and Hugh Kennedy from PJA.
The "AI is not being used to transcribe customer conversation even though that would seem obvious in retrospect" point was new to me at least