People often revere Data like Data is a God. But how data is calculated is where the action is — not just as output in a process.
Most of us in business are often ruled in our thinking by numbers, financial projections, and track record as credibility. It is the operating assumption few dare to question. We look at the deck, the data, the growth curve, the listener counts, the audience stats, the algorithm rankings, the funding round. We treat those numbers as sacrosanct. We make decisions — major, life-altering, company-defining decisions — based on what the spreadsheet says.
We are often hypnotized when it comes to numbers and get fooled. Repeatedly. Expensively. And sometimes irreversibly.
I have spent more than four decades working at the intersection of complex ideas, disruptive ventures, energy power, water, healing, and the markets that either receive them or don’t. What I have learned — often in rooms where the numbers often appear as extraordinary and yet, something else entirely is actually happening — is this:
The process by which a company, a partner, or an associate does what it does is where the action is in any venture. The process reveals & transmits a consciousness — a venture’s receptivity, awareness, beliefs, standards, and mental constructs. Not in a spreadsheet.
Numbers can be deceptive, not reveal origins or why the numbers are what they are in any given situation. They can be presented by someone or some group with what they want us to see. The process of how people or a company does what it does, how it thinks & what it values tells us what we are really interacting with. I have two stories that demonstrate this and I lived both of them. I was present and in the room.
Bell Canada and the Venture That Looked Unstoppable
At 26 years of age, I encountered this observation at scale.
After having left a 13 year tournament tennis career as a young adult, I was working as a tennis instructor in Beverly Hills when one of my clients — Sylviane Herzog, founder of a Telecommunications company called Concorde Communications — mentioned during one of our breaks that a significant deal was in the making. Bell Canada formed an offshoot called Protocol which was entering the U.S. market to seize a great opportunity to repackage an industry with a terrible reputation. They were interested in repackaging the telephone answering service industry through a franchise concept like Century 21. The numbers, the projected growth, the market opportunity — all of it was compelling on paper.
My mind went immediately to the heart of it. I grasped not only the opportunity but the communication and market positioning challenges that Bell Canada’s team had not yet fully comprehended. Sylviane arranged a meeting and Bell Canada hired me on the spot. With the full support and knowledge of Protocol, I operated as Sylviane’s de facto Vice President — without the title, but with every bit of the authority the role demanded. I identified a manager who was undermining her business and had the discernment — and the nerve — to say so. I rebuilt from there: trained the staff, overhauled pricing, re-packaged and invented another one of their services and shaped it into something coherent and compelling, wrote the marketing materials, and went out on sales calls both alone and alongside Sylviane. I also spoke at the industry convention and published in their trade magazine.
Concorde Communications was one of only five test sites selected across the entire United States for the Protocol R&D project.
What I came to understand was that Protocol would never achieve mainstream adoption. Not because their vision lacked ambition or market opportunity lacked accuracy. Even with substantial international experience, funding, & corporate backing, but because their parent corporation fundamentally did not understand the real market, the business owners and the culture they were trying to reshape.
The telephone answering service industry was built by independent owners — entrepreneurial men and women who had created something personal, something theirs, something they controlled & made independent decisions about. These were not corporate employees waiting to be folded into a franchise structure. They were individuals who had built their businesses from the ground up, on their own terms, with their own identity intact. Protocol did not perceive that what they were doing was superimposing Bell Canada’s corporate culture onto those independent businesses and their owners. It was never going to take. They could read a market size and opportunity, but they could not read the reason for being of the business owners.
This is what I mean by the process transmits consciousness. Bell Canada’s entire approach — the way they designed the R&D Project as a model, the way they engaged with the test sites, the assumptions embedded in key decisions they made — revealed a belief system that said: we are the corporation, and the market will conform to us. These little business owners will realize that they can’t compete with us and they will join Protocol. This mindset & beliefs were their fatal flaw. No projection would change it. No growth chart addressed it. The process showed me exactly what was going to be a 20 million dollar failed venture.
When the R&D phase concluded, Protocol presented their terms: sign on, dissolve the Concorde Communications name, and fold into our structure. Everything Sylviane had built over the many years — the goodwill, the client relationships, the reputation — would be surrendered to a corporate framework that, as I had already seen clearly, was not built to last.
Bell Canada was and still is a powerful company. Sylviane worried that walking away meant being left behind — or worse, that they might move to marginalize or crush Concorde entirely. I helped her move through that fear and laid out precisely what Bell Canada didn’t understand, and what she stood to lose if she signed on with them. I gave her the clarity she needed to make the right decision for her business and her life. She finally made the tough decision to cut loose from them and go on with her own venture.
One year later, Bell Canada shut down Protocol entirely. Had she signed on, Concorde Communications would have been dissolved. She would have surrendered decades of goodwill, fractured her brand, had to rename her company — only to watch Bell Canada abandon Protocol, pull them out of the US Market & move everyone back to Canada.
The Merger That Looked Great on Paper
The second story is shorter. The lesson is identical.
Two principals from a large answering service doing very well wanted to grow even bigger by acquisition and merging. They approached Sylviane with a merger proposal. The numbers were compelling. The projected growth was impressive. On the face of it, it was a very attractive offer.
I joined them in the conference room. While Sylviane was focused on the financial opportunity, I was reading something else entirely — the people, the culture, the unspoken communication and the energy dynamics, everything spreadsheets don’t capture. I observed that this merger would be a serious mistake. After many meetings, she finally walked away from this merger deal as well.
The capacity to see what is actually present beneath the surface of what is being presented — and to act on it — is what separates a good decision from an expensive one. The numbers in that room were real. The projections were real. What was also real, and far more important, was the consciousness those two men brought into the room with them. Their process — how they presented, how they engaged, what they assumed, what they revealed without knowing they were revealing it — told me everything a spreadsheet could not.
What the Numbers Will Never Tell You
We are living in an era of metric-driven certainty. The language of “just look at the data” but without context and other aspects that come into play that translate as a part of causality. Funding rounds confer legitimacy. Listener counts and audience stats are sold as proof of influence. Algorithm rankings substitute for genuine reach. Track records are presented as guarantees of future success based on criteria that often guards the gates of older ineffective & outdated beliefs, practices and standards.
None of it tells us what we most need to know.
It doesn’t tell us whether a company or a partner shares our values or merely our vocabulary. It doesn’t tell us whether an organization is receptive to what it doesn’t yet understand, or whether it has calcified around what it already believes. It doesn’t tell us whether the people across the table are building something real or performing the appearance of it. It doesn’t tell us whether a deal that looks extraordinary will dissolve the very thing we spent decades creating.
The process tells you that. The energy in the room tells you that. The consciousness behind the numbers tells you that.
I have watched well-funded organizations fail because they mistook capital for effectiveness, accuracy and discernment. I have watched entrepreneurs sign agreements that looked perfect on paper and fractured everything they had built. I have watched platforms optimize for metrics while losing the human beings behind them. In every case, the numbers were real. In every case, something else — something the spreadsheet had no column for — was more real.
The question is not whether we can read the numbers. Everyone can read the numbers.
The question is whether we can read where the numbers are coming from, how they are calculated and what the numbers may be possibly shielding.
A Final Thought
I am not suggesting that we ignore financial models, projections, or track records. I am suggesting that we stop treating them as the whole picture of accuracy, transparency, predictive success or failure, or even truth.
The most important due diligence we will ever do is not in the data room. It is in the room itself — reading the process, reading the people, reading the consciousness behind decisions an organization makes about how it does what it does. That is where their beliefs live. That is where their mental constructs announce themselves. That is where we find out whether a deal is worth pursuing or not and not just what it appears to be.
Bell Canada has been around for a very long time. They identified a real industrial opportunity. They did their R&D in the market they sought to dominate. They had funding and, their thinking and business processes revealed a fatal blind spot. I saw it at 26. It cost them everything they had invested in Protocol. It would have cost Sylviane everything she had built. We no longer have to learn this the hard way.
If something here struck a chord, I welcome a conversation — book a Discovery Call directly on this site.
Kim Greenhouse © 2026