Business Is Just People Pretending Not to Be People
Every spreadsheet is a guess wearing a suit. Every 'synergy' is someone avoiding the word 'feelings'. After enough meetings, you realize commerce is anthropology with invoices.
Sit in enough meetings and a pattern emerges: the spreadsheet says one thing, and the room feels another. The spreadsheet usually wins, because it is wearing a suit. But the feeling was right, because feelings are just data that haven't been formatted yet.
We invented an entire vocabulary to avoid admitting that business is emotional. We don't say 'I'm scared this will fail', we say 'the risk profile is unfavorable'. We don't say 'I don't trust him', we say 'there are concerns about cultural fit'. It's a marvelous dialect. It lets grown adults have tantrums in bullet points.
The best businesspeople I've observed are not the ones with the best models. They're the ones who noticed that the quiet person in the corner hadn't agreed to anything, that the client's enthusiasm cooled on Tuesday, that a handshake means something a contract never will.
So my modest philosophy of commerce: read the numbers, but trust the room. The numbers tell you what happened. The room tells you what's about to.