The Digital Caterpillar

The blue glare of the monitor is vibrating against the back of my skull at 2:01 AM. I am watching a progress bar crawl across the screen, a digital caterpillar representing $1,000,001 of shareholder capital, and all I can think about is the yellow highlighter sitting on Sarah’s desk in the cubicle next to mine. Sarah is a veteran of the logistics department. She has been here for 31 years. Tomorrow morning, she will arrive at 8:01 AM, log into this ‘revolutionary’ new enterprise resource planning system, and navigate through 11 different screens to find the shipping manifest. She will then press ‘Print.’

We spent a million dollars to make Sarah’s manual highlighting more expensive.

Dressing a Corpse in Neon

In the old days, if a workflow was stupid, you could just cross it out with a pen. Now, the stupidity is hard-coded into a cloud-based infrastructure that requires a $201-per-hour consultant to even suggest a change. I’ve been thinking a lot about William R.J. lately. He’s a vintage sign restorer I met in a dusty workshop behind a decommissioned gas station.

“If the structural frame is rusted through, the neon will eventually crack, no matter how bright the gas glows. You’re just dressing a corpse. If the bone is bad, the skin won’t hold.”

Our corporate ‘bone’ is bad. We have these 101-step approval processes that originated in 1981 because one guy in accounting once lost a receipt for a $51 steak dinner. Instead of removing the redundant steps, we spent a fortune to build a digital dashboard that tracks those 101 steps in real-time. We’ve automated the friction. We’ve digitized the waste.

The Arrogance of Cure

There is a specific kind of arrogance in the modern C-suite that believes technology is a curative. It’s the digital version of alchemy-the idea that if you just add enough ‘data-driven insights’ and ‘AI-powered workflows’ to a pile of bureaucratic lead, it will eventually turn into operational gold. But software is not a magician. Software is an amplifier.

I remember one specific meeting where we discussed the ‘customer onboarding journey.’ We had 41 internal touchpoints. Instead of asking, ‘Why do we have 41 touchpoints?’, the project lead asked, ‘Which software can track these 41 touchpoints most efficiently?’ We spent $300,001 on a CRM integration that did exactly what it was told. It tracked the misery. It mapped the delays. It gave us a 101-page report every Friday detailing how we were failing our customers with surgical precision.

The Rusted Frame

You cannot build a skyscraper on a swamp, no matter how much you spend on the elevator system. In my search for sanity, I’ve realized that the only way out is a process-first methodology. It’s about stripping the sign down to the rusted frame, just like William R.J. would.

This is the core philosophy I’ve seen championed by groups like

Debbie Breuls & Associates, who seem to be the only ones pointing out that the king has no clothes-and the clothes he doesn’t have are incredibly expensive and hosted on AWS.

The Digital Roadmap

There’s a strange comfort in spending money on technology. It feels like progress. You can show the board a ‘Digital Roadmap.’ You can put ‘Transformational Leader’ on your LinkedIn profile. You can point to the $801,001 investment as proof that you are ‘future-proofing’ the company.

But true future-proofing isn’t about the tools; it’s about the fluidity of the work itself. It’s about having the courage to look at a 21-step process and say, ‘Steps 4 through 19 are useless. Kill them.’

Alphabetizing Stale Spices

I think back to my spice rack. I spent 51 minutes making sure the Allspice was next to the Anise. It looks beautiful. It’s perfectly organized. But if the spices inside the jars are 11 years old and tasteless, the organization doesn’t matter. The meal will still be bland. Most digital transformations are just alphabetizing stale spices.

We focus on the labels and the jars because the actual flavor-the core work-is too messy and difficult to address.

Restoring Structural Integrity

William R.J. finished that neon sign eventually. He didn’t just fix the glass; he re-welded the frame, replaced every inch of the 71-year-old wiring, and scraped away layers of lead paint until he reached the original metal. Only then did he pump the neon back in. When he flipped the switch, it didn’t just glow; it hummed with a structural integrity that felt like it could last another 91 years.

The question isn’t whether the software works. The question is, why are we so afraid to fix the thing the software is supposed to be doing? If we don’t start with the process, we are just building more efficient ways to lose our way. And in a world moving this fast, a million-dollar map that leads to a dead end is the most expensive mistake you can make.