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The Ghost in the Machine: Ugly Truth vs. Beautiful Lies
None of these 147 charts can answer the simple, five-word question my boss emailed 27 minutes ago: ‘Are we on schedule for Phase 7?’
I minimize the beautiful, useless window and open the spreadsheet. It’s ugly, it’s patched together with conditional formatting and lookup functions that would make a real data scientist weep, but it has the answer. It always has the answer. The spreadsheet is the ghost in the machine, the unofficial, unloved, and absolutely essential nervous system of this entire project.
The Platform
Expensive Coffin
The Spreadsheet
Ghost in the Machine
The $2.7 million platform is just the expensive coffin we bought to bury it in.
The Perpetual Scapegoat
We don’t buy enterprise software to solve problems. Let’s just be honest with ourselves for a moment. We buy it to professionally outsource the blame for our hopelessly broken processes. The software is the new guy, the one who doesn’t know the backstory, the one we can all point







