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The macro numbers go

After a week spent reconciling career totals, I dropped the whole class of aggregate numbers and told the team why.

A week of ledger work had gone into reconciling career totals. There were two competing built-work totals, two competing year counts, and, on the firm's own website, a collective built-value line and a P&L-managed line. I had just settled my own Tellus totals when, minutes later, I stopped.

I am refusing the whole class of number. I do not want to do these macro figures at all, because everybody knows they cannot be trusted. We talk about impact, role, results and philosophy instead, and we focus on the stories we are telling. This is a position held out loud, firmly enough that asking me for one would be absurd. It is not a matter of having fewer numbers.

Since a reader cannot verify them, the thing to focus on is a process that resonates, the work product, the deliverables and a personal connection. A total that nobody can check tells the very reader it was meant to impress that we are inflating, and it had caused every dispute in the record.

Within the hour the rule was in the operating constitution. Fourteen ledger rows were marked internal record only. Everything else was rewritten around role and results: the profile paste, the wiki pages, the partner record and the twin corpus rules. The five macro lines on the website are queued for removal.

When the reader cannot verify a fact, it is not a credential. Show the work instead. I had just asked for those totals to be settled, then changed my mind in public and said why, which is what the rule asks everyone else to do.

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