Large companies can often obtain more capital, software or external expertise. What they cannot easily manufacture is more high-quality managerial attention. As organisations add data, projects and automation, the bottleneck can move from information scarcity to decision scarcity.
For much of modern corporate history, capital was treated as the scarce resource around which strategy had to be organised. A company that could attract funding could build factories, hire people, acquire competitors and enter new markets. In 2026 that logic still matters, but a different constraint is becoming more visible inside large organisations: the finite amount of high-quality attention available to decide what deserves priority, what can be delegated and what should stop.
The change is easy to miss because it rarely appears as a line item. Management attention is not reported on the balance sheet. Yet it is consumed whenever executives review projects, reconcile conflicting targets, join escalation calls, approve exceptions or repeatedly revisit decisions that were never fully settled. When that burden grows faster than the organisation's ability to delegate, the result can look like a capital problem even when money is available: projects wait, launches slow, risks sit unresolved and teams optimise for access to senior leaders rather than for customer outcomes.
The productivity backdrop makes the issue more important. The OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2025 documents the persistent weakness of productivity growth across advanced economies. At the firm level, decades of management research have found large differences in productivity even among businesses operating in similar sectors. The implication is not that attention alone explains the gap. It is that how management capacity is allocated is increasingly part of the productivity story.
The new scarcity is not information. It is selection.
Digital systems have dramatically increased the amount of information that can reach managers. Dashboards update continuously, collaboration tools remove distance, and AI can generate analysis at a speed that would previously have required teams of analysts. But a larger flow of information does not create a larger capacity to judge it. Every additional alert, scenario, meeting and recommendation competes for the same limited executive time.
Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index illustrates the scale of interruption in digitally intensive work. Its telemetry found that heavily messaged employees were interrupted by a meeting, email or chat roughly every two minutes during core working hours, with 275 pings across a 24-hour day for the most interrupted group. These figures come from Microsoft customers rather than a representative sample of every workplace, but they make a useful point: the friction is increasingly not access to communication but the cost of deciding what deserves a response.
For senior managers, the stakes are higher because their attention is a shared organisational resource. A choice to spend an hour on one issue is also a decision not to spend that hour on another. The opportunity cost is often hidden, because no accounting entry records the strategic question that was never discussed or the customer problem that remained below the escalation threshold.
What executive time-use research tells us
A long-running research programme on CEO behaviour provides unusually concrete evidence. A NBER review of CEO time use and firm performance summarises diary data from 1,114 chief executives in six countries covering more than 42,000 activities. At the median, meetings consumed more than half of CEO working time. The researchers also found substantial variation in how executives allocated time and in how much decision authority they delegated.
The important finding is not that meetings are bad or that executives should simply work fewer hours. The research shows that different firms benefit from different managerial styles, and that performance depends partly on the fit between the leader's behaviour and the organisation's needs. That makes attention an allocation problem rather than a wellness problem. The relevant question is whether scarce senior attention is being spent on decisions where senior judgement adds the most value.
This is consistent with the broader World Management Survey research programme, which links structured management practices such as monitoring, target setting and incentives with differences in organisational performance. Good management is not merely the presence of more oversight. It is the design of systems that allow information and authority to move to the right place without every issue climbing the hierarchy.
Why complexity quietly taxes attention
Complexity consumes attention in several ways. More products create more trade-offs. More jurisdictions create more regulatory exceptions. More systems create more reconciliation work. More committees create more interfaces between decisions. Each individual addition may be rational, but the cumulative effect is a queue of issues competing for scarce managerial bandwidth.
This helps explain why organisational simplification has become a recurring theme among large companies. In its 2025 annual report, Bayer said its Dynamic Shared Ownership model had removed up to six organisational layers and reduced management positions by roughly two-thirds. Bayer's current DSO framework explicitly aims to move decisions closer to the people doing the work. These are company-reported outcomes rather than independent proof that delayering automatically improves financial performance, but they show how one large organisation is treating hierarchy as a decision-speed issue rather than only a cost issue.
Citi offers a financial-services example. In its 2025 shareholder letter, the bank said its organisational simplification had brought the heads of its five businesses directly into the central management process and placed senior management closer to clients. Again, the strategic significance is not simply fewer layers. It is the attempt to shorten the distance between information, authority and accountability.
AI can relieve the burden - or multiply it
Artificial intelligence is often presented as a solution to overloaded knowledge work. It can summarise documents, draft analysis, monitor workflows and surface anomalies. Used well, that can reduce the amount of low-value preparation required before a decision. But AI can also create more candidate decisions than an organisation has the capacity to absorb.
If every team can cheaply generate ten strategic options, the organisation has not necessarily become ten times more strategic. It may simply have created a larger review queue. The same is true of automated alerts. A system that detects more exceptions without improving triage can increase the amount of senior attention consumed by false positives or low-consequence issues. The productivity gain then migrates upstream while the bottleneck reappears at the point of judgement.
This is one reason the next generation of productivity systems may need to optimise not only task completion but attention routing: which decisions can be automated, which can be delegated within clear guardrails, which require independent review, and which genuinely warrant executive intervention.
Attention has a balance-sheet analogue: carrying cost
Capital has an explicit carrying cost. Attention has an implicit one. A decision that waits three weeks for a committee may delay revenue, inventory release, hiring or risk remediation. A project that requires repeated executive review can consume opportunity cost far beyond the salaries of the people in the room. Yet because the cost is dispersed across calendars and queues, it is rarely measured with the same discipline as financing expense.
Companies can begin to make the cost visible through operating data: time from issue identification to decision, number of decision owners, number of times a decision is reopened, share of cases escalated above the designed authority level, and percentage of senior meeting time devoted to recurring exceptions rather than forward-looking choices. None of these is a universal management KPI. Together, however, they can reveal whether scarce attention is being spent on the organisation's highest-value uncertainties or on avoidable internal friction.
The counterargument: senior attention is often valuable precisely because it is scarce
The case for reducing management burden can be overstated. Banks, insurers and other regulated firms need independent challenge, segregation of duties and escalation paths. High-impact capital allocation, risk acceptance, acquisitions, model changes and major customer remediation should not be pushed downward merely to improve speed. A slower decision can be economically rational when the downside is asymmetric.
There is also a risk that flatter structures shift managerial work rather than eliminate it. A business can remove formal layers while creating informal coordination burdens, broader spans of control and more peer negotiation. The savings from fewer managers can then be partly offset by hidden meeting and alignment costs. That is why the useful objective is not maximum decentralisation. It is a better match between decision rights and the information needed to exercise them.
How to distinguish healthy governance from attention congestion
The practical challenge is to distinguish useful senior involvement from congestion. One signal is decision latency. If issues with clear owners and known thresholds repeatedly wait for senior forums, the organisation may have designed authority too narrowly. Another is reopening: when decisions return to the same committee because inputs were incomplete or accountability was ambiguous, attention is being consumed by process failure rather than by new judgement.
A third signal is escalation concentration. If a small number of processes generate a disproportionate share of senior review, the problem may not be management capacity at all. It may be product complexity, weak data, unclear policy or a control that has become too broad. Fixing the source can release attention without weakening governance. This is important because simply adding more committees can increase throughput temporarily while making the organisation even more dependent on coordination.
The strongest operating model therefore treats attention the way treasury treats liquidity: protect a reserve for genuinely high-value uncertainty, monitor where it is being consumed, and avoid using scarce capacity to fund recurring problems that should have been solved structurally. The analogy is imperfect, but it encourages leaders to ask not only whether a decision was made, but what higher-value decision was displaced while management made it.
Evidence versus inference
The evidence is strong that management practices and managerial behaviour are associated with firm performance; that senior executives devote a large share of time to meetings and coordination; and that modern digital work can generate intense interruption. Large companies such as Bayer and Citi are also explicitly redesigning structures to reduce layers and bring decisions closer to operations.
The inference is that management attention should be treated as a scarce corporate resource with an economic opportunity cost. There is no accepted accounting measure for 'attention capital', and organisations should be cautious about converting an intuitive idea into a simplistic score. The value lies in identifying where decision queues, repeated escalations and duplicated governance are constraining outcomes.
Implications for banks, companies and investors
For banks and fintechs, attention scarcity matters because highly regulated operating models naturally create review points. The goal should be to preserve independent challenge while removing duplicate review and giving routine decisions clear, auditable authority. AI can help with evidence preparation and triage, but governance should prevent automated systems from flooding senior committees with low-quality recommendations.
For corporate leaders, the strategic question is whether organisational design protects senior time for irreducibly senior problems: portfolio choices, culture, capital allocation, major risk trade-offs and external relationships. For investors, management quality may increasingly include evidence that a company can make consequential decisions without forcing every ambiguity to the top of the organisation.
Conclusion: the next productivity gain may come from protecting judgement
Companies have spent decades trying to make labour, capital and technology more productive. The next frontier may be the productivity of judgement itself. As information becomes abundant and analysis becomes cheaper, the scarce resource is increasingly the ability to decide what matters, assign authority and move on.
The organisations that handle this well will not necessarily have fewer meetings, fewer managers or more AI. They will have a clearer architecture for attention: routine matters resolved close to the work, important exceptions escalated once rather than repeatedly, and senior judgement reserved for choices where its opportunity cost is justified. In that sense, management attention is beginning to look less like overhead and more like a strategic asset that can be squandered or compounded.
References
1. OECD - OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2025
2. Microsoft - 2025 Work Trend Index: The Frontier Firm is Born
3. NBER - CEOs and Firm Performance
4. World Management Survey - The New Empirical Economics of Management
5. Bayer Annual Report 2025 - Chairman's Letter
6. Bayer - Dynamic Shared Ownership