A spreadsheet is not a strategy

Picture the meeting. A slide goes up, a number goes down and somewhere in the room, someone claps.

The line item is a renegotiated managed services contract, a hardware order trimmed to “just enough,” or a headcount freeze that quietly became a headcount decrease. Whatever it is, it looks great in the deck. The CFO nods. The COO nods harder. Everyone agrees this was smart.

Three months later, something breaks — an incident nobody can escalate fast enough, a part that doesn’t arrive in time, a senior engineer who finally takes that recruiter’s call. Nobody connects it back to the slide. The slide was right. The spreadsheet said so.

This is the part where I’d like to gently suggest that a lot of very smart people are managing to the cell instead of managing to the outcome — with total confidence, because the cell is the only thing anyone asked them to optimize.

To be clear, this isn’t a jab at the leaders doing it. I’ve done it. I have a Six Sigma certification and a well-worn habit of measuring things, and measuring things is good — right up until the measurement becomes the mission. The problem was never the spreadsheet. It’s mistaking it for a map.

Outsourcing: The invoice goes down, and so does everything you can’t put a price on

I’ve watched this failure mode play out more times than I can count. Across nearly three decades in infrastructure — as chief technology architect at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare), integrating roughly 300 acquired companies into a 420-location footprint — the pattern held: The moment a relationship with the people who actually knew a system got treated as a line item instead of an asset, the organization lost something the spreadsheet never had a row for.

Vendor and MSP contracts are the cleanest modern example: Savings are easy to show, losses are easy to miss. You cut the line item. What doesn’t show up anywhere is the on-call engineer who used to just know — the environment, the history, the thing that broke in 2019 — replaced by a support queue and an SLA that’s met on paper while your business is down in practice.

None of this is the vendor’s fault — they’re delivering exactly what the contract asked for. CIO.com’s own reporting on the hidden costs of outsourcing makes the same point from the other side: Ineffective knowledge transfer and high vendor-side attrition can permanently erode institutional knowledge the client never gets back. The contract took away flexibility. The person who used to just fix it — the one who wore six hats and closed the gap on a Tuesday afternoon — gets replaced by a role with a scope of work. Scopes of work don’t wear hats. A five-minute favor becomes a change request, routed through a ticketing system, against a rate card. You didn’t just outsource a function. You outsourced your ability to handle it — and bought back a slower, costlier version of the same fix, one billable hour at a time.

JIT procurement: A factory formula applied to a business that isn’t a factory

Just-in-time assumes something that doesn’t exist: A crystal ball good enough to see today’s need and whatever shows up next. I learned that the hard way at GE Medical Systems, when a new customer opening a facility wanted several hundred patient-critical bedside monitors customized to match a color scheme from their marketing department. Our processes were built entirely around clinical function — the thing that keeps a patient alive — and nothing accounted for a hospital wanting its equipment to match its brand. It came in from left field. We had no SKU for “must match burgundy.”

We ended up standing up a new department — Specials — because the existing process had nowhere to put a request like that. Building the flexibility after the fact was expensive. But it became a real differentiator: As far as I know, we became the first and only medical device manufacturer with a dedicated specials department. It told customers something that mattered more than paint color: They came first, and we’d find a way to say yes.

The lesson wasn’t “predict better.” It was “build systems with teeth” — flexibility designed in, not bolted on after reality shows up sideways. Dell and HP figured this out decades ago: You can order a PC built to your exact spec and have it shipped in days, because their systems were engineered for change. Most IT organizations still build for demand they can already see, then treat every surprise as an exception instead of the job itself.

This wasn’t a one-off: Supply chain analysts at SupplyChainBrain noted that during the 2021 chip shortage, many manufacturers found their lean JIT models weren’t built to flex under real disruption. “Just in time” only works until the time arrives and the thing isn’t there.

Headroom is savings, too — paid out in advance instead of on the back end, which is why it never gets credit. Nobody puts “the department we didn’t need to build in a panic” on a savings slide, because avoided cost doesn’t announce itself the way cut cost does. The expense of headroom is visible and immediate; the expense of its absence is invisible until it isn’t. It’s an incident report.

The hour that reads as free

I lived a version of this at GE Medical Systems. We built life-critical patient care products in a market crowded with giants — Philips, Siemens, HP — where nothing shipped until it cleared FDA review. On one release, scope crept weekly because sales kept promising new capability to close deals, and no one above us would draw a line around what “done” meant. What we got instead of a defined scope was a war room: Catering, a fridge stocked with Mountain Dew, enough M&Ms to open a candy counter — everything money could buy to keep engineers at their desks around the clock, except the one thing that would have actually helped: Someone willing to tell sales no.

We hit the deadline. The product cleared FDA review. When it shipped, there was no “great work,” no pat on the back — just the quiet message that this was expected of us. We won on the software. We failed on the people. That’s sunk-cost thinking in its purest form: Once a team’s extraordinary effort becomes the baseline, the extraordinary disappears the same way the ordinary already had.

Salaried time reads the same way on every spreadsheet I’ve seen since: Already paid for, so effectively free. Nothing stops it from being spent — on the meeting that could’ve been an email, on the ticket queue treated as bottomless, on “just have IT handle it” as the default answer. Burnout doesn’t have a line item either, until it shows up as attrition, and attrition finally does, at which point everyone acts surprised. It’s not small: Gallup estimates disengaged employees cost the global economy trillions a year — roughly 9% of global GDP, sitting outside any single department’s budget. The spreadsheet didn’t lie to you. It just never had a cell for the thing that mattered most.

The ledger nobody built

Zoom out from these three stories and the pattern is the same: Reporting structure decides which questions get asked. When technology reports through a CFO or a COO, the question every quarter is “what did this cost us today?” Almost never “what did this cost us to keep?” An organization that only asks the first will keep hiring smart people to answer it well — in exactly the wrong direction, forever.

None of these leaders are bad at arithmetic. Most are excellent at it. The tragedy isn’t the math — it’s the ledger: Precise, defensible calculations against books never built to hold the costs that matter most, and calling it leadership. I’ve seen this enough times to give it a name: The leader who runs a technology organization strictly by the numbers handed to them, gets good at it and never gets fired for it — not because they succeeded, but because the failure never had a cell to live in. The spreadsheet balanced. The building didn’t burn down that quarter. They got promoted.

That’s the actual scandal, worth saying to the room and not just the page: A CIO who has never once been wrong on a savings initiative hasn’t been managing technology. They’ve been managing a spreadsheet, and calling the absence of visible damage “success.”

Before the next savings initiative gets a round of applause, three questions worth asking honestly, out loud, in front of people:

1. What does this cost that will never appear on an invoice — and am I certain, or just unbothered?
2. Who inherits that cost, and will I still be in this seat when the bill comes due?
3. If I can’t put a number on it, have I decided it’s zero — and whose job was it to notice first?

The savings will still show up in the deck. If nothing else shows up beside it, that isn’t restraint — it’s the tell.