Seeing like a spreadsheet

The article traces how electronic spreadsheets changed corporate life by making calculation fast, cheap, and widely usable. That shift helped spread a financial view of the firm, strengthened private equity and dealmaking, and encouraged managers to treat companies as systems to optimize rather than organizations to build.

It then uses that history to frame AI as the next information technology that can reshape coordination inside firms. The author expects AI to make organizations more legible and more centralized, while also risking the loss of the human and unquantifiable parts of corporate life.

Reading notes

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• Before spreadsheets, managers depended on slow, labor-intensive information processing and had limited ability to understand large firms.
• VisiCalc emerged from Dan Bricklin’s idea of a “word processor that would work with numbers” and became the first killer app.
• Lotus 1-2-3 beat VisiCalc on IBM PCs, and Excel later won through the graphical user interface and Microsoft Office.
• The spreadsheet made modeling iterative and cheap, so users could explore scenarios and adjust assumptions until outputs matched desired targets.
• In the 1980s, falling rates, abundant credit, and deregulation helped private equity and leveraged buyouts grow.
• KKR, Blackstone, Carlyle, Bain Capital, and Michael Milken all used spreadsheets to model deals, cash flows, and bond markets.
• The spreadsheet helped make a financial view of the corporation feel neutral and universal, even though it hid things that could not be quantified.
• The author says this logic contributed to outsourcing, offshoring, buybacks, dividend payouts, and weaker engineering and manufacturing capacity at firms like Boeing.
• AI is presented as a stronger version of the same coordination tool, able to process unstructured information and support much larger and more centralized organizations.
• The warning is that AI may make companies more legible from above while devaluing the human elements it cannot turn into workflows.