There is a lesson you learn in the boardroom when the number doesn't match reality.
And there is a lesson you should have learned before you got there.
The first lesson teaches you how to survive the room. Separate the quality of the work from the outcome. Learn to make excuses and sort for blame.
The market. The supply chain. Blah blah blah.
It teaches you to point a finger.
When you point a finger, four are pointing back at you.
Useful to survive. Not to thrive.
The second lesson asks a harder question. Why didn't the number match reality in the first place? What process produced the wrong data? What assumption was never challenged? What was happening in the building that the result didn't capture? What external impacts did we not check?
Some companies have to lower production expectations when deer season starts. It's not in the model. It's not in the data. It's in the community the building sits in. The kind of thing nobody thought to check because nobody thought it was the kind of thing you check.
Until the number missed.
The first lesson makes a more confident executive.
The second lesson makes a better organization.
Most people walk out of that board room having learned the first one, carrying it forward as an artifact.
It doesn't stay in the board room.
Ask my first wife.
