The price we all pay when a spreadsheet is at the wheel.
Picture a fancy New York hotel — the kind you’d see in a Christmas movie. Now ask yourself: when is the last time you actually encountered a doorman?
Doormen, once a fixture of high-end hospitality, have been systematically replaced by automated sliding doors. On a spreadsheet, the logic is airtight. A sensor and a motor cost less than a salary. The door still opens. Problem solved.
Except the door was never the point.
The Doorman Fallacy
Marketing strategist Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, calls this the Doorman Fallacy. Strip a doorman’s role down to its single measurable function — opening a door — replace it with automation, and record the savings. The spreadsheet shows a win.
What disappears from the spreadsheet: the security the doorman provided, the recognition of returning guests, the subtle signal that you are not just expected, you are welcome. Strip that out and you don’t just lose a doorman. You lose consistent-paying regulars, your rack rates fall, and five years later you’re sitting on an unprofitable piece of real estate.
As Deming put it: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.”
Sutherland argues that the same logic is now being applied to AI. The easiest way to justify an AI investment is headcount reduction. So that’s how it’s being sold — not as a tool for generating new value, but as a tool for cutting existing cost. The first phase: “Same as before, but cheaper.”
The Alchemist vs. The Accountant
For the past decade, the Chief Sustainability Officer operated as a strategic alchemist. Their mandate was to find the intersections where social impact and long-term business value collided — proving that doing better and growing faster were not in conflict. At its best, the annual sustainability report attracted high-conviction capital, restless talent, and partners who wanted to build something lasting.
In 2026, the Alchemist has been replaced by the Accountant.
By moving sustainability under the CFO, the brief has narrowed from “How do we change the world?” to “How do we avoid a fine?” The goal is no longer to be bold — it’s to be invisible. Report accurately against mandatory frameworks. Don’t miss a deadline. Don’t expose the company to regulatory risk.
The result is “green-hushing”: the corporate equivalent of Schrödinger’s ESG. The company might be doing something good, but it’s too terrified of putting a foot wrong with the regulators to tell anyone about it.
This restructure is entirely defensible on paper. Mandatory reporting is real, and putting a finance professional in charge of compliance risk makes sense. But this is the Doorman Fallacy applied to the soul of the company. Just as a sensor can technically open a door, a compliance officer can technically manage sustainability. What you lose — and what never appears on the same spreadsheet — is the accumulated erosion of the intangible. You’ve traded a magnet for talent and a driver of innovation for a defensive shield. You’ve managed the risk, but in doing so, you’ve quietly strangled the reward.
A Formula for Failure
If you need a more visceral illustration of the Doorman Fallacy in action, look no further than Aston Martin’s 2026 Formula One season.
F1’s 2026 regulation cycle introduced the most radical power unit change in a generation — a shift from an 80/20 ICE/hybrid split to 50/50. Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll saw this as an opportunity. He acquired Adrian Newey — the greatest aerodynamicist in the history of the sport — and gave him the keys to the entire operation, appointing him Team Principal.
The results have been catastrophic.
The car arrived at testing requiring immediate, extensive modifications. The Honda power unit produces vibrations so severe they’re damaging components and causing nerve pain in the drivers. The team accumulated less than half the mileage of top competitors in early testing. Newey has publicly blamed everyone else — Aston Martin for not hiring him sooner, Honda for not staffing the project with his preferred engineers.
The lesson is sharp: Newey’s genius is real and measurable. His track record is extraordinary. But leading 800 stressed humans, managing critical partnerships, and navigating intense media scrutiny during a technical crisis doesn’t show up on a résumé or a CAD blueprint. Stroll hired the world’s most advanced automatic door and asked it to act as the hotel doorman.
What This Means for Your Organisation
The tragedy of the “high IQ, low EQ” organisation is that it believes it is being rigorous when it is actually being lazy. It is far easier to measure the cost of a person than the value of their presence.
The antidote isn’t to abandon measurement. It’s to invest equally in what Sutherland calls the Unmeasurable Multipliers:
The Power of the Symbolic. Doing things that don’t “scale” — precisely because they signal to customers and teams that you care about more than just the bottom line.
The ROI of the Irrational. Investing in “psychological moonshots” — the doorman, the charismatic leader, the bold sustainability goal — that create a halo effect far beyond their functional utility.
The Human Edge. In an AI-driven world, “average” is now free. Anything standard, logical, or fully optimised carries zero competitive advantage. Value lives exclusively in the outliers — in the things only a human would be bold enough to attempt.
The doorman didn’t just open a door. He signalled that the building was worth entering.
Perhaps we should stop asking “What does this cost?” and start asking “What does this mean?”
In 2026, the most successful organisations won’t be the ones with the best spreadsheets. They’ll be the ones who remembered that business is, was, and always will be, a social science — not a branch of physics.
Daniel Ross Perry 