Chesterton and Excel

Have you ever wondered what would happen if G.K. Chesterton and Dan Bricklin met? What would they have talked about? Bowling, maybe? 

To those uninitiated, Chesterton was a philosopher and writer born in the late 1800’s, and Bricklin, still alive and kicking today, is an innovative businessman and engineer, an alumni of both MIT and Harvard Business School. Chesterton perfected the pithy turn of phrase; 54Bricklin invented the 66spreadsheet.

In a parable of sorts, Chesterton once wrote about the existence of metaphoric fences, a phrasing later echoed by John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, Bricklin’s little experiment in two-dimensional matrices, an heir to the ancient abacus, became the doorway to modern accounting and finance, but also the proverbial fence hindering a CFO’s vision for a finance team’s growth. 

You can find the full version and analysis of Chesterton’s second-order thinking 115here. The shorter version: Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.

What would Chesterton and Bricklin actually talk about? Maybe that, by designing the archetype for Excel, Bricklin built a fence by which thousands of finance teams would use as their guardrails for understanding company performance. But as CFO began to 84explore last week, and will continue to investigate this month, despite the yearning many CFOs have to move past the ubiquitous green and white ‘X’ icon, there are good reasons why it persists, and that fence has not yet been banished.  

Are you and your finance team wrestling with Excel’s place in your lives? Stay tuned. And if you think Excel needs to leave this mortal coil, remember that Chesterton also once wrote that the way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.