What's Missing on Your Balance Sheet

I've rarely had a job with big wins built into it.

No sales targets. No product launches with a launch date and a press release. Most of my career has been in support  or strategic roles — the kind of work that exists to make other things go right, rather than to be the thing that goes right.

In IT support, the accounting was almost comically lopsided. A failure had an obvious cost. Production servers down for half a day, and everyone in the building knew it, down to the dollar figure someone would eventually put on it. A success didn't register at all. Were the systems up this month? Yes? Then I guess I did my job. Nobody posts an entry for "nothing happened." There's no line item for the outage that didn't occur because you caught the failing disk on Tuesday.

Later, the work changed, but the ledger problem didn't. Most of what I did was help other teams perform better — sales, marketing, product. That expanded into something looser: cross-pollinating between teams that didn't normally talk to each other, mentoring people earlier in their careers than I was. When it worked, the win showed up on someone else's side of the page. Sales hit the number. A junior person got promoted. Two teams that used to duplicate each other's work started collaborating on something better instead. Those are real entries. They're just not entries under my name.

Some Transactions Never Get Valued

Some transactions get valued the moment they happen. Others never get valued at all. That's what bad bookkeeping actually looks like — not just sloppy math, but some transactions never even make it onto the page.

Look at what actually sticks. A big win sticks. A big loss sticks too — you don't forget the outage, the missed deal, the year everything went sideways. Even a small loss sticks, oddly enough. It's the small win that disappears. Not because it mattered less. We just don't track it.

A big win gets valued instantly. Revenue is obvious. No one has to think about it. A title change shows up on an org chart. A launch has a date, and the date either happened or it didn't. Someone else already decided what it was worth before you ever had to write it down.

A small win doesn't get that treatment. What's "I asked the right question in that meeting and it changed the direction of the project" worth? Nobody's decided. So it doesn't get an entry, not because it doesn't count, but because no one ever assigned it a value in the first place.

Losses don't have that problem, especially the small ones. Embarrassment gets valued instantly. Doubt gets valued instantly. Nobody has to decide what the feeling of having said the wrong thing three hours ago is worth — it's already valued the moment it happens.

The ledger itself is neutral. It only reflects what gets recorded. The bias is upstream of that — in what gets valued without anyone having to think about it, and what doesn't. Small wins are the ones that get left off the page, not because they're worth less, but because nothing ever decided what they were worth at all.

That's a different problem than having too many debits or too few credits. Some transactions never get valued at all.

The Discipline Isn't Valuing — It's Noticing

I've thought about assigning a value to it — figuring out what "I asked the right question in that meeting" is worth. I'm not sure that's the actual fix, and in fact, I think chasing it might be its own trap. Maybe the answer isn't a system of values at all. Maybe it's just the habit of noticing a transaction happened.

A transaction doesn't need a value to belong on the ledger. It needs to be acknowledged as an event. The small loss gets recorded automatically because the feeling itself functions as the entry — you don't have to decide what it's worth, it just posts. The small win rarely gets that treatment, and it has nothing to do with worth. Nobody trained anyone to notice it as a transaction in the first place.

The Loss With Something Underneath It

Some losses aren't a single transaction. They're a total that absorbed several entries before anyone looked at what was inside it.

A stretch of a career without the big win gets filed as one line: not a good year. But that top-line number nets out everything underneath it, and some of what's underneath isn't growth or lessons — it's impact that had nowhere to post. The colleague who didn't quit because you talked them through a bad stretch. The project that didn't collapse because you caught a problem early enough that nobody downstream ever saw it. The two people who are better at their jobs now because you spent time with them and neither of them would think to credit you for it. None of that shows up in the year-end total, not because it didn't matter, but because the total was only ever built to answer one question — did the big thing happen? Everything else got folded into the answer without being counted on its own. The impact isn't just uncounted. It's hidden inside a total that makes it look like it never happened.

Going back through a year like that and pulling out what's actually inside the total isn't about feeling better. It's closer to correcting the books. The bottom line might still say loss. It rarely says loss with nothing underneath it. 

The Business Version

Businesses keep the same lopsided ledger. A viral moment — good or bad — is a transaction with a number attached before anyone even asks for one. Impressions, shares, a spike on a dashboard, a headline. If it's a viral win, it gets celebrated in a leadership meeting. If it's a viral misstep, it gets a postmortem and possibly a press release. Either way, it's an entry, because attention is something every company already knows how to measure.

Showing up in alignment with your narrative for the 211th week in a row doesn't come with a number. Nobody puts "narrative consistency, week 211" on a dashboard. There's no chart for the campaign that didn't chase the trend, the message that didn't contradict what was said in the deck two quarters ago. No line item for the response to a customer complaint that sounded like the same company that wrote the mission statement.

Those are transactions. They just don't post, because nothing about them announces itself the way a spike does.

So a company's internal ledger ends up looking a lot like a person's. One viral week can dominate the account while 200 quiet weeks of actually being who you say you are never show up as a line item. The board doesn't ask how consistent the story was this quarter. They ask what happened, and "nothing happened, on purpose, for the two hundredth time" isn't an answer anyone knows how to book.

None of this argues for chasing virality less or fearing it more. The transaction occurred whether or not the moment produced a number. Consistency is a transaction too. Nobody trained the business to notice it as one.

Where This Gets Structural

For people in support and enabling roles, this isn't just a personal blind spot. It's built into the job.

A sales number is a transaction. A launch date is a transaction. But "I spent six months getting two teams to actually talk to each other" isn't something any performance review has a box for. It happened. It mattered. It just gets folded into something vague, like "collaborates well."

And here's the part that matters more than my own bruised ego about it: if the company can't see that transaction on my ledger, it can't see it on its own either. Say someone's steady judgment kept quietly preventing small fires — fires nobody even remembers, because they never got the chance to become fires. Nobody wrote that down anywhere. Then that person leaves. And it's not just that the company forgot to give them credit. The company never had the information to begin with.

Berkson's Bits

Consistently exceeding customer expectations is not sustainable. And it's not necessary.

What I'm Listening To...

This may count as reading as much as listening. 

I am listening to the Audible version of The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. Many times in my work life, I’ve had to navigate new jobs and new roles. While it’s mostly stuff I already know, it helps to be reminded of, and have some structure around, preparing for and navigating change. 

I don't know what my own ledger actually says. I can point to the entries that got missed easily enough — the years that went fine and left no trace because nothing went wrong, the people who moved on to something bigger, carrying a little of what we worked on with them, even if I'll never see where it landed. What I can't tell you is what the balance would look like if all of it had been counted.

The total at the bottom of a hard year is rarely the whole story. It's just the part that had a number attached.

What should be on your ledger that never got an entry?

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan