Recently I read a post on substack with the title “nobody works”. The point of the author was that in most companies there is a very small number of people who typically work their tails off and that are creating all the value for customers and that are, de facto, responsible for virtually all revenue. This dovetails nicely with our research on R&D effectiveness that, in practice, concludes that it is about 1 in 10 in R&D that actually adds value. It’s not that the rest isn’t busy and running around, sitting in meetings and frantically answering emails. It’s just that most of the work in companies tends to be busywork that does not generate value. At some level, everyone knows this, but is too polite to criticise the staff functions, the non-value adding roles in teams and the processes that are there because some idiot at some point thought it was a good idea. When times go bad, however, companies often “return to their core” and start to clean quite aggressively to remove all the non-value adding roles, functions and teams. So, as things look a bit rocky going forward, perhaps spend some time ensuring that you are among the few that are delivering real value and that the company truly cannot do without.