ACT II: THE MACHINE — How the system works (or doesn't)
Management, in the broad sense of the term, requires—among other things—control, mastery, both of resources and of process. Often, for various reasons, control is habitually absorbed by daily operations, by the everyday grind, generating an unsettling sensation of being out of control, of inefficiency, of poor time management.
Faced with this sensation, it's common to request "little spreadsheets" in Excel to record how much time each task takes, with the hopeful goal of finding improvements in individual habits.
This excellent work of engineering generally arrives through reading some Guru who implemented it with great success back in '84, at the Sarasa Motor Co., or at Apple Pie Sarashinton Inc., which supposedly guarantees the tool's success.
What ends up happening with these little spreadsheets is that nobody reads them, nobody processes them, nobody analyses them. Not even the person who requested them.
Naturally, this type of "control" generates, a priori, certain improvement opportunities, since it's an introspective and moderately analytical exercise.
Notwithstanding the above, I think we could assume that the improvement opportunities that appear are nothing more than demonstrations of poor time use and bad work habits.
The problem that brings me to this post is that with this common approach, we evade the critical analysis of work processes, the resources allocated to the task, the analysis of controls, or something as basic as understanding the scope of each position.
Little Excel spreadsheets to record what workers do or don't do should be part of an organisation's culture of best practices, but they shouldn't be a control mechanism...
Reading what others do is good. Thinking and critically analysing what we do is even better...
The Taleb Connection
The little spreadsheet is the manager's via negativa in reverse. Instead of removing the part of the system that's broken — undefined roles, mis-allocated resources, unread processes — they add an instrument that generates the feeling of measurement.
"Less is more and usually more effective." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012), Book V
That's the line the spreadsheet violates. The article's actual remedy isn't more tools. It's the harder, less satisfying work of asking what the team is even supposed to be doing — and whether the structure supports it.
The reason the spreadsheet ritual is so durable is that it's Procrustean: the messy reality of work is squeezed into a row-and-column format that the format itself cannot accommodate. Nobody reads the result because nothing legible could come out of the wrong instrument. The point of the exercise was never the data — it was the appearance of control.
Reading what others do (implementing the guru's solution from '84) is cheap. Critically analysing what you do requires skin in the game — because the answer might be that the problem is your structure, not your workers' habits.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration—clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.