Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story called "On Exactitude in Science" in which an Empire became so skilled at cartography that it eventually produced a map at a 1:1 scale: a map that captured every detail of the territory, without exception. It was a perfect map, and a useless one. In the story, later generations, more practical in their thinking, left it to decay in the desert, where it slowly fell apart. Borges presents it as a cautionary tale: when you pursue absolute precision, you lose sight of the original purpose: to guide.

A few days ago, I was meeting with a group of business owners discussing KPIs, and management information. One of them, running a company with around €8 million in revenue, pulled up a spreadsheet with more than twenty tabs, meticulously tracking every aspect of the business, from sales to finance to the full production process. While several people in the room looked on impressed, one of them asked a question that stopped everyone cold: is all of this for you, or for your team?

That question carried more weight than it seemed. A business owner running an €8M company shouldn't need twenty tabs to know how the business is doing. The higher up you are in an organisation, the less data you need in front of you, not more. Otherwise, you're either doing the work your team should be doing, or duplicating it. Either way, it's:

• inefficient, because you're not paid to play the violin and conduct the orchestra at the same time; and
• ineffective, because your job isn't to control every detail but to make clear decisions. And clear decisions require less information, not more, as long as it's the right information.

Gathering all the data you possibly can isn't rigour. It's noise. And it ends the same way as Borges's map: in pieces, abandoned in the desert.

© Oriol López Villena 2026

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