The Anatomy of Enterprise Overhead Bloating

Posted on September 26, 2006 ·

Good reading:

“Real Overhead: The percentage of your workforce that does not interact with either the product or the customer

This is always a fascinating conversation with customers. In my last startup we had 2.6% of the workforce in this category. 97.4% was interacting with the product or the customer. I just worked with a Fortune 500 client where this ratio is around 25-35% (they can’t quite figure it out). In their case thousands of people do something else but what makes the company create value.”