THE LOSS YOUR SPREADSHEET WILL NEVER SHOW

How many times have you redone a task that had already been done?

I’m not talking about the lost file, the technical rework, that report that had to be rewritten because someone accidentally deleted it. I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about that moment when you realize, in the middle of a meeting, that the team is discussing — for the third time, in different words — the same problem that had already been solved, or that everyone swore had been solved, six months ago.

This never shows up in any financial report. No productivity indicator captures it. And yet, it’s probably the biggest cost inside your company.

I’ve lived with this for more than twenty-eight years, inside organizations of every size and sector. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, with a certain discomfort, it’s that the most expensive waste is never the one you can see.

Lost material, we see. Overtime, we calculate. Technical rework, we document. But the waste of clarity — nobody measures that. It simply happens, every day, silently, draining the energy of good, competent people who work hard and still feel like they’re rowing against a current no one names.

I want to propose an exercise. Picture an intersection with no traffic lights, at rush hour. Everyone accelerating, everyone in a hurry, everyone believing they have the right of way. No one is standing still. No one has their arms crossed. And yet, traffic doesn’t move. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens inside a company. Everyone working, no one idle, and the result stuck.

It’s not a lack of effort. It’s a lack of agreement.

I’ve sat with brilliant directors — people who know everything about their own market, about margins, about competition, about technology — and when I asked, with an almost uncomfortable calm, “what exactly do you need to deliver this quarter, and how will that be measured,” they went silent for longer than they should have.

Not because they didn’t know how to work. Because no one had ever asked that with clarity. The goal existed, but vaguely, generically, almost decoratively, hung on a slide in a quarterly meeting. And each manager, in the absence of a clear answer, created their own version of the goal. A patchwork of individual priorities, each making sense on its own, and all of them together pulling the company in slightly different directions.

This isn’t a failure of character. It’s a design flaw.

A poorly planned house has hallways that lead nowhere. A poorly designed company has competent people running through hallways that lead nowhere. And the worst part: running fast.

There’s a scene that repeats itself, almost identically, company after company, sector after sector. A problem shows up. Someone puts out the fire. They applaud the hero of the day. Two weeks later, the same problem reappears, slightly disguised, and someone puts it out again. And again. And again.

No one stops to ask why the fire started in the first place.

I often tell a room full of managers that solving the same problem every single day isn’t competence. It’s a symptom. It’s the company’s body signaling that there’s a root cause no one has had the courage, the time, or the tools to investigate.

Imagine someone who, every morning, has to put a bucket under the same leak in the ceiling. He takes pride in his own efficiency — placing the bucket in the right spot, at the right time, without spilling a drop. But the roof is still broken. And it will stay broken as long as the entire household’s effort goes into the bucket, and not into the roof.

Organizations love the bucket. The bucket gives an immediate sense of control. Fixing the roof requires stopping, climbing up, getting your hands dirty, admitting that things would get worse before they got better. And few companies have the stomach for that, because the bucket looks productive and the roof looks like a waste of time.

Except the roof is the only place where real money is being lost.

You may know this other kind of waste up close: two areas that, on paper, should complement each other, and that in practice live in a low-intensity friction. No one shouts. No one slams doors. But there’s a constant tension, a silent game of passing the buck, decisions that take longer because they pass through an invisible filter of distrust between departments.

It’s like driving a car with the handbrake pulled halfway up. The car moves. It reaches its destination. But it burns twice the fuel, the engine overheats, parts wear out faster, and no one understands why that car — so well maintained on paper — consumes so much to travel so little.

Chronic organizational conflict is exactly that. It doesn’t stop the company from moving. It stops the company from moving with the efficiency the engine would allow, if the brake were released.

And the most curious thing is that when I ask who is responsible for releasing that brake, the answer almost never points to a person. It points to a void. A space no one occupied, because no one was ever told, in plain words, that space was theirs.

I think about this a lot when I observe my own routine, away from the corporate environment. At home, sometimes, two people argue about who should have taken out the trash, and deep down the problem was never the trash. It was that no one had clearly agreed whose task it was that week. The anger left over isn’t about the trash bag forgotten in the kitchen. It’s about the absence of an agreement that should have existed beforehand.

Companies do this on an industrial scale. Entire teams arguing about deliveries, deadlines, quality, when the real problem was born much earlier, at the moment no one honestly defined who would own what.

For me, after so many years, leading stopped meaning inspiring speeches or drawing grand visions of the future. It came to mean, above all else, having the courage to say, eye to eye: this is yours. This delivery, this decision, this result, is your responsibility, and this is how I’ll know whether you delivered.

It sounds simple. Almost too obvious to write in a text. But it’s precisely the obvious that most companies never do.

There’s a word I avoid, because it’s become a cliché from being used so meaninglessly, but the phenomenon behind it is real: alignment. I’m not talking about mission-and-vision speeches framed on the reception wall. I’m talking about two people, in different areas, who can describe the same company priority in similar words, without rehearsing.

Have you ever tried this in your company? Ask, separately, three managers from different areas what the number one priority of the quarter is. If the answers are similar, you have an organized company. If they’re completely different, each defended with conviction as their own version, you have, right there in front of you, the most expensive waste that exists.

Because each of those managers will spend budget, team time, emotional energy, and political capital defending a priority the others don’t even recognize as a priority. And by the end of the quarter, everyone will present flawless individual results, and the company, as a whole, will have advanced far less than the sum of those efforts would suggest.

This doesn’t show up in any balance sheet. But it’s there, eroding margin, holding back growth, wearing out good people who start to wonder why they work so hard to harvest so little.

I don’t have a magic formula to solve this in three steps, because I deeply distrust anyone who promises that. What I have, after so many years sitting in those rooms, is a question I usually hand back to whoever comes looking for me, before any diagnosis:

Does your company know, with clarity, what each leader needs to deliver, and how that delivery will be recognized?
Are the problems that come back every week treated at the root, or merely managed with competence?
How much of leadership’s energy is spent putting out fires, instead of building structure?
Do the areas of your company truly cooperate, or do they just coexist politely?
Is your company developing managers capable of sustaining the business’s next size, or does it still depend on the same usual heroes?

None of these questions has an easy answer. And maybe that’s exactly why most companies prefer not to ask them.

There’s a fourth kind of waste, perhaps the most corrosive of all, because it erodes without anyone noticing where the noise is coming from: inconsistency in decisions.

One week, a certain behavior is tolerated. The next week, the same behavior gets someone reprimanded. A project gets top priority in a Monday meeting, and by Thursday it’s already forgotten, replaced by another urgency that will also be forgotten in fifteen days. People quickly learn not to trust what they hear, because what’s valid today may not be valid tomorrow.

At home, this happens too, and we recognize it instantly. One day a father lets his child eat candy before dinner because he’s too tired to argue. The next day, for the same scene, he yells as if it were a crime. The child doesn’t learn the rule. They learn that the rule depends on the mood of whoever’s in charge. And sooner or later, they stop trusting the rule and start testing the mood.

Companies do this all the time, on a much larger scale, with far costlier consequences. Entire teams stop trusting leadership’s word, not because the message is a lie, but because it changes direction at a frequency no compass could withstand. And once trust in the leader’s word runs out, every future decision requires double the effort to be accepted, because it arrives carrying a skepticism that leadership itself helped build.

There’s a scene that also repeats itself, and that I watch with a mix of compassion and frustration: the manager who avoids the difficult conversation.

He knows he needs to tell someone on the team that the delivery isn’t good. He knows he needs to end a project that isn’t going to work. He knows he needs to publicly admit that an earlier decision was wrong. And even knowing it, he postpones. He postpones because the difficult conversation hurts, and the human body has long been trained to avoid immediate pain, even when that avoided pain today turns into multiplied loss tomorrow.

It’s like not going to the dentist out of fear of the pain of the visit, and letting a small cavity turn into an inflamed root. Postponement never eliminates the problem. It only trades a small, manageable pain for a bigger, costlier one, and almost always at a worse moment to deal with it.

I’ve seen entire organizations carrying, for years, a decision everyone knew needed to be made, and that no one had the courage to sign off on. The cost of that postponement doesn’t appear as a line in the budget. It appears as a fog spread over all the other numbers, making everything a little slower, a little more expensive, a little harder than it needed to be.

I often challenge the executives I speak with to think less about management tools and more about management courage. Because tools, everyone has access to. Spreadsheets, indicators, methodologies, courses, certifications — all of that is available to any company willing to pay for it.

What separates a company that grows sustainably from one that lives in cycles of euphoria and crisis usually isn’t access to the tool. It’s someone at the top being willing to face an uncomfortable conversation, to admit a mistake publicly, to say no to a beloved project, to hold someone accountable who is also their friend outside of work.

That’s not taught in a one-afternoon lecture. It’s built, slowly, through repetition, through example, through people willing to fail in front of everyone and correct themselves in front of everyone too.

And maybe that’s exactly the difference between leadership that merely manages the present and leadership that actually builds the business’s next size. The first survives the quarter. The second sustains the decade.

I sometimes think about the driver at that unmarked intersection. He doesn’t need a more powerful car. He doesn’t need more haste. He needs someone to organize the flow, to say who goes first, to turn each person’s individual hurry into collective movement.

It’s strange to think that, often, what a company is missing isn’t more people working hard. It’s fewer people working alone, in the wrong direction, with a great deal of conviction.

Maybe the hardest part isn’t identifying where the waste is. Most managers, deep down, already know. They know which conversation is being postponed. They know which roof needs fixing. They know which priority was never truly agreed upon between areas. The hard part is saying it out loud, in a full room, without looking for someone to blame outside themselves.

And maybe that’s the true size of the loss that no spreadsheet can ever show.

If these reflections resonate with the challenges you face in your company, I’d be glad to talk with you. Visit marcellodesouza.com.br and explore other publications on leadership, management, and organizational behavior.

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