The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money.
You have two poles here.
1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money.
2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon.
The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.
You have two poles here.
1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money.
2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon.
The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.