Hamel and Zanini argue that the ratio of managers and administrators to all employees could be halved from 1:4.7 to 1:10. That would, they reckon, free up 12.5 million people to do more creative and productive work. Adding to that direct gain the indirect savings that could come from eliminating a lot of wasteful internal compliance activities, the authors arrive at the deliberately provocative estimate that excess bureaucracy costs US companies $3 trillion a year, which is equal to 17% of annual GDP.
