The board pack runs to twenty pages. Nothing in it has changed a decision.

Most management reporting grows by accretion, and the test that would prune it is a single question almost nobody asks of a metric.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for The board pack runs to twenty pages. Nothing in it has changed a decision.

Reporting accumulates. A number gets added because someone asked for it once, a chart survives because removing it feels like admitting something, and within a few years the monthly pack has grown to twenty pages that take two days to assemble and forty minutes to skim. The revealing question is not whether the numbers are accurate. It is whether any of them, at any plausible value, would have caused the business to do something different. Run that test honestly across a typical pack and the answer for most of the…

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