• Ash Shisr excavation in Oman showing collapsed stone ruins over a desert sinkhole and limestone cave.

    Business Value and ROI

    This is Ash Shisr. A fortress built on the most profitable trade route of the ancient world. It didn’t fall to war. It fell because its architects ignored the sediment. They built a massive weight on a hollowed-out foundation. Sounds familiar?

    Read in the post about:

    The 1914 Circuit Diagram: How Donaldson Brown at DuPont originally built ROI as a diagnostic decomposition to understand why returns differed—a tool we have since lobotomized into a simple, binary checkbox.

    The Protection Spell: Why the boardroom’s favorite “mathematical truth” is actually a defense mechanism used to avoid the messy work of diagnosis.

    The Seven Layers of Sediment: An archaeological dig through 111 years of methodology bullshit, from 1972 SAP coding shortcuts to the accounting philosophies that enabled the 2008 crash.

    The AI Sinkhole: Why applying this hollowed-out, century-old formula to “AI Transformation” is like measuring blood pressure while the ground is opening up beneath your feet.