The Excel Competency Paradox and the Management Disconnect

By Hiran de Silva. Inspired by a LinkedIn post by George Mount.

For more than a decade, social media has been flooded with “Excel tips,” “shiny new features,” and “best practice tutorials.” These posts are shared, liked, and reposted by the millions. But look closer and you’ll notice something remarkable: almost 100% of this content is designed for the single user, working alone in their own box of responsibility and awareness.

That makes sense—after all, the largest audiences on social media are novices, beginners, and enthusiasts who think inside their own box. Influencers are not chasing management. They’re chasing clicks, engagement, and the easiest harvestable audience.

But herein lies the disconnect.

Management Doesn’t Care About Purple Squares

I often describe this with my “purple square and spray gun” sketch.

• The social media world teaches people how to paint neat little purple squares on a wall—an isolated, narrow exercise in features.
• Management, however, is not interested in squares at all. They want the entire wall painted—and if possible, they want it done with a spray gun, fast, clean, and scalable.

So while influencers excite their audiences with inside-the-box tricks, management views those same efforts as irrelevant, or worse, counterproductive.

The Resume Illusion

This shows up clearly in hiring. Candidates proudly list Excel skills on their resumes: VLOOKUP, PivotTables, Power Query, macros. Some even categorise themselves as beginner, intermediate, or advanced.

From management’s perspective, the outcome is no different. Whatever the claimed level, the result is the same: messy, fragile workbooks that do not meet enterprise needs.

We saw this in the much-shared budgeting consolidation example using Power Query. What looked sophisticated to practitioners was unimpressive—and even regressive—from management’s point of view.

The Drill Bit vs. The Hole

Theodore Levitt once said: “The customer doesn’t want a quarter-inch drill bit. The customer wants a quarter-inch hole.”

But in today’s Excel culture, the situation is worse. Not only does the consultant show the customer a drill bit, they drill the hole in the wrong place. When management points this out, the consultant replies:

“Ah, but this is best practice. Look—50,000 social media posts say so.”

This attitude is widespread. And when the consultant proves unwilling or unable to correct the issue, they leave—or are fired.

Management’s Quandary

At that point, management faces an unenviable choice:

1. Go back to the old way, flawed though it may have been.
2. Stick with the new “solution,” even though it has made things worse.
3. Spend millions on a new ERP system—hoping it will fix the problem.

No wonder frustration with Excel is so widespread. The problem isn’t the tool—it’s the narrow, box-bound methodologies being applied.

Where True Value Lies

Now imagine walking in at that exact moment. Instead of defending purple squares, you pick up the spray gun. By Friday, you’ve built a working prototype that meets management’s requirement exactly.

At that moment, you become the person management has been waiting for:

• More effective than the IT department, even with their £10 million budget.
• More agile than the FP&A vendors with their “cloud-based” promises.
• The only one in the room who can deliver, because you know Excel’s enterprise architecture.

And here’s the kicker: employers don’t know this skill exists. Which means when they see it in action, they value it spectacularly.

They also know they can’t find anyone else. The structures of recruitment, the categories of “beginner–intermediate–advanced,” do not capture this skill. That leaves you with a formidable advantage: your pay rate is determined not by the market, but by the value you’ve just created.

Conclusion

This is the paradox of Excel competence.

• What’s considered “advanced” in the feature-first culture creates dysfunction.
• What’s considered “basic” in architecture delivers real enterprise value.
• What’s dismissed as “obsolete” remains the most powerful toolset for management.

Until we flip the script—from purple squares to spray guns, from drill bits to holes—management will remain unimpressed, and enterprises will continue to miss out on the true power of Excel.