Agreed, starting my career as an in-house data analyst at a mid-sized public software company, I was able to show executives things they didn't know within a few months. Not because I was particularly smart, but because there was so much low hanging fruit.

While I disagreed with him on this point, here's another angle on how low hanging the fruit was: My manager _explicitly_ told us to never use statistics, because we'd be wasting our time with effects which weren't large enough to be obvious.