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Welcome to the HBR idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickers.

Imagine a restaurant where you sit down and order your meal.

And eventually your platter of hot food comes to you through swinging doors from the kitchen.

Now imagine you're at a different restaurant where you order the very same meal

except you can see into the kitchen. You can see the cooks preparing your meal,

putting it into the oven, you see them plate the food and add a last pinch of salt,

and then you see the server carry it over to you.

In the first restaurant, your meal appears almost magically.

You never see the people who made it for you.

In the second, your experience is different.

You have more of a sense of the work that goes into your food.

Our guest today argues that too much of business today is like the first restaurant.

In the spirit of efficiency, much of the work we pay for is now hidden.

In back offices, far away in another country, or buried deep in an algorithm.

There are many advantages to that, but Ryan Beall says it also creates a problem for companies.

By losing any window into the work being done for them,

customers have grown less satisfied with what they buy,

and employees can feel underappreciated too.

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