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Every organisation has a garbage can.
It is rarely visible. It does not sit in a corner or carry a price tag. Yet it quietly absorbs time, attention, energy, and goodwill.
In New York City, a well-known study once estimated that maintaining a single public garbage can cost over $53,000 a year when labour, logistics, and oversight were added up. Each element made sense in isolation. The total only became striking when someone paused to look at the system as a whole.
Most companies have their own version of this.
It appears in the form of meetings that continue out of habit, reports prepared more for reassurance than for decisions, and slide decks that exist because they always have. These activities were once useful. They addressed real needs at a particular moment in the organisation’s life. Over time, the context shifted. The work stayed.
The real cost shows up in people.
Capable employees spend hours each week feeding systems that no longer return much value, and the effect is rarely dramatic. Energy ebbs rather than collapses. Judgment becomes careful where it once was confident. Motivation slowly reshapes itself into compliance. The organisation stays busy, calendars full and outputs visible, yet progress begins to feel oddly distant, as though motion has replaced momentum.
This is how busyness comes to masquerade as effectiveness.
What makes these drains difficult to challenge is that they are anchored in respectable ideas. Accountability. Alignment. Risk control. Governance. Each has a legitimate place. Problems arise when mechanisms designed for one phase of growth are left untouched in another.
Systems tend to outlive the conditions that created them.
Leadership, then, becomes less about introducing new initiatives and more about recognising what no longer deserves attention. Many organisations are not short of effort. They are short of discernment.
A revealing question for any leadership team is simple.
What work continues today because the system once needed it?
Weekly forums, approval layers, reporting rhythms, and review rituals often persist without anyone remembering the original problem they were meant to solve. Over time, these accumulate into a quiet tax on focus and morale.
Every organisation has at least one activity that functions as its own $53,000 garbage can. It absorbs disproportionate energy while contributing little to outcomes. It survives not because it is essential, but because stopping it requires someone to say so.
That act of stopping is not administrative. It is strategic.
When leaders remove low-value work, they do more than increase efficiency. They return time and attention to the organisation. They signal trust. They create space for thinking rather than performing activity.
A simple test often clarifies things.
If this activity disappeared tomorrow, what would genuinely stop working?
Not in theory. Not in anticipation. In practice.
When the answer is unclear, the organisation may have found something worth letting go.
Leadership is often described as setting direction and driving execution. It is equally about restraint. About recognising when the system has accumulated weight that no longer serves it.
The most costly waste in organisations is rarely financial.
It is capable people investing their best energy in work whose purpose has quietly expired.
And every organisation has at least one place where that is happening, unseen, and unquestioned.
