Every known reserve will be utilized. It’s a natural law. Its manifestations in business are especially interesting to me (I work in project management – buffers / reserves are an issue here). The rule causes organizations exceeding a given employment level to create work for the purpose of work itself, i.e. with little or no value for the end customer. Lets say that after reaching a certain size, support processes finally take over 🙂
Here’s a rough graph which might trigger some thoughts…
A stands for organizational value [as a whole] per one employee. This might increase for several reasons – one which comes to mind is simply scale, another – specialization.
B is value generated individually, by a single person.
With the increase in size comes vagueness in defining value created by an individual.
