The False Fix

Dirty data is expensive.

Unity disclosed an estimated $110M impact after ingesting bad customer data. JPMorgan's $175M acquisition of Frank ultimately centered on one question: what counts as a real user? The damage of poor data integrity was not a dashboard error. It became acquisition fraud, criminal convictions, and prison sentences.

Discover misclassified its own card products in pricing tiers from 2007 to 2023. The cost: over $600M in combined refund and retained earnings impact.

All because of a vocabulary gap.

And yet, data hygiene is the least popular topic in a meeting. If someone raises it, you can guarantee a yawn. Because talking about the Canon Void is the elephant in the room.

It's much easier to buy a shining new CRM with cool features and animation. Or build a new fancy dashboard, the ultimate multiverse in disguise. Or hire a Chief Data Officer who will have the answers. Or nominate a data taskforce filled with 12 people, then 6, then 4 (last meeting cancelled, slack channel quiet ever since).

My favorite fix is the all-of-the-above. A new dashboard. New MBOs tied to adoption. Incentive competition between departments. A visionary announcement in all hands: everyone's excited and genuinely on board. Finally some clarity. More reporting, more tools. Teams submit feedback pending clarifications that never come. A machine learning layer trained on the same dirty data.

6 weeks later all that's left is a merch mug.

Each one of the fixes is a portal jump. Because buying or building or migrating a new CRM doesn't solve the core issue. The Dashboard is not the solution, it's a mirror and the problem was never technical to begin with.

If each department sees a different reflection, nobody tells the CDO that Sales' definition of 'user' means something different than what RevOps has been calling 'user'. Then we get multiple ARRs for the same company.

The bigger the company gets, the more fragmented its vocabulary becomes. Who determines the source of truth? That's the real issue.

The fixes don't work because they never fixed the Canon Void, they just changed the software.

Canon Voids do not announce themselves. They run for sixteen years and then surface as a $600M cost. Because the behavior remains the same, the new CRM mutates into a new monster within twelve months.

You cannot buy your way out of the multiverse. You have to collapse the timelines.