The spreadsheet that runs the company
Almost every organization has one: a critical spreadsheet that grew load-bearing by accident and that one wrong cell could break.
Look closely at almost any company and you'll find it: the one spreadsheet that quietly became critical. It started as a quick way to track something and grew, year after year, into a load-bearing part of the operation — held together by formulas only one person understands.
Accidental infrastructure is fragile
Nobody decided this spreadsheet should run a core process; it just happened gradually. Which means it has none of the safeguards real infrastructure would: no validation, no access control, no backup of its logic, no protection against someone fat-fingering a cell and silently breaking everything downstream.
Respect it, then replace it
The spreadsheet earned its place — it encodes a real, proven process, which is valuable. The move isn't to mock it but to recognize it as the prototype it is and graduate the critical parts into something with the safeguards the operation now needs. The risk isn't the spreadsheet; it's pretending it's not critical.
Every company has a spreadsheet one wrong cell away from a crisis. The danger is pretending it isn't infrastructure.