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"How My MBA Helped Crack the Voynich Manuscript": A thread. 1/
You call it an enigma: an illustrated parchment manuscript produced in Italy during the early fifteenth century full of mysterious symbols, codes, and secret messages that have eluded the best efforts of cryptographers and scholars for centuries.
We call it an action item.
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We call it an action item.
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The deliverable? A robust and scalable solution to the Voynich Manuscript that would achieve max buy-in from Corporate without feather-ruffling our key investors. 3/
First, though, we had to actually get our grubbies on the thing, which they keep in a vault in the Beinecke Library at Yale. 4/
Not a problem. Most of us are Wharton guys, but I got a buddy in New Haven whose dad was old Deke brothers with a major donor up there, so we were able to execute a major time-save and get our nasties on the vellum without going through Procurement. 5/
The manuscript arrived same time as our Uber Eats. We did a spread-out in Conference C with all the stakeholders to ogle the baby and color-code the content. (Little hitch with the parchment, which didn’t like the highlighter pens, but we found a workaround.) 6/
We started with some blue-skying between my team and I [sic, bitches]. Lightning-round, tennis-balls-to-the-wall stuff. We weren’t going to get into a pissing contest over a stack of semicompetent sketches from some twisted medieval fuck who couldn’t even get around on Adobe. 7/
I’ll admit it, there was some initial stymification at wheels up. One my new teamsters spent a summer abroad in Florence so I thought he’d have a phone-it-in moment, but the gofer just testiculated for a while before folding like a decka. Frankly we were turd polishing here. 8/
Once we started flipping pages in the manuscript, though, the team eyeballed some truly snackable content: that killer weed in the first couple of gatherings, a bunch of psycho plants obviously plagiarized from Dr. Seuss, and those hotties hot-tubbing in Gatorade on 72v. 9/
If we wanted to crack this motherfucker, though, we were going to need max prep and all hands. We’d eat this elephant one bite a time. “Sweep the sheds, guys,” I told my team. “No pen trial or minim is too small for an eye-catch.” 10/
I looked around the room, hating what I had to say next. “We’re weekending this.” No apologies. There were some good-spirited groans, sure, but I know me lads. Game. Fucking. On. 11/
Long story short: we tag-teamed with some bros we know down in Analytics and came up with an ingenious and utterly original solution to the Voynich Manuscript that no man has ever achieved in history—all in forty-eight flat. 12/
While the details are eyes-only for the near, what we can reveal is our project code name. We called it Low-Hanging Fruit, named after the blue Froot Loops plant some medieval second-grader drew on the verso of folio 95. (I know, right? Fits like a neoprene glove.) 13/
Tell you, though, the big jaw-drop here was the failed brain dump from the so-called specialists. We arranged a consultancy with a strike team of medievalists from the Ivies. Top-of-the-line folks, we were assured, real pacesetters in the field. 14/
We assumed the pinheads would come in like any flock of knowledgeables, peel the onion, and do the drill-down a project of this magnitude requires. We handed out the NDAs, herded the Hancocks, and unsheathed the swords, prepared to go full Dothraki with the Tall Foreheads. 15/
Not to blamestorm, but it was a lead balloon. These hired guns? Silo rats with no bandwidth. 16/
Those Luddites couldn’t think outside the boxes of their narrow specializations in “codicology” (wtf?), “paleography” (already tried paleo, thanks), and “extensive linguistic training” (hello? Python, anyone?). 17/
This one chick from Brown (I know, bro) kept insisting that a genuine solution to the Voynich Manuscript would require the accumulation of “years of scholarship” and also “patience” and a “touch of modesty.” (I shit you not, bro. Patience! Modesty! Her words, not mine.) 18/
Sorry, gang, but those just aren’t the core competencies required if you’re going to wrestle a gorilla like the Voynich. In our world we’re hanging bells on cats every fucking day, not cowering in the stacks singing kumbaya. 19/
Library geldings, all of them. Let them eat their parchment. We’re dining on the heart. 20/
We left the brown-bag even more confident in our outcomes than we were before. Time for the go-live. T-minus now. I hit send. 21/
Okay, sure, we got some push-back from the thirtieth floor—inevitable when you’re outpacing the paradigms. There was the inevitable game of suits and ladders with the execs, though things never went full piranha. 22/
The worst moment came when that new VP saw me in the elevator and eye-fucked me to the wall for a few seconds before hitting me with his best grip-and-grin. We were in. 23/
Before sending the manuscript back to Yale, we scissored a few cut-outs and sent them down to Design. They came up with a genius idea for a martini glass modeled on that batshit cone flower on folio 40v. 24/
We sent a case to every member of the Board, and let me tell you, some serious glass was raised at the celebratory hootenanny.
Big question for us now is how we monetize.
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Big question for us now is how we monetize.
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