The Quiet Invoice

There is a particular kind of compliment that should worry you. It usually arrives in a performance review, or in the corridor after a crisis has been averted: “You’re so easy to work with.” It sounds like praise. It is often, in fact, an invoice: one that never gets itemised, never gets paid, and never stops arriving.

Every organisation runs two economies side by side. The first is the one on the org chart: titles, mandates, reporting lines, KPIs. The second is invisible. It runs on favours, introductions and goodwill, and is arguably the one that actually moves decisions. Who gets looped into the strategic email. Who gets the unofficial heads-up before the formal announcement. Who gets vouched for in a room they’re not in. None of this shows up on a balance sheet, but everyone who has worked inside an institution for more than a year can feel its weight.

Harvard Business School researchers Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant spent two decades mapping exactly this terrain through what they call organisational network analysis — essentially X-raying a company to see who actually talks to whom, and who gets asked for what. Their finding (see Figure 1), drawn from a study spanning more than 300 organisations, is stark: a small sliver of employees — typically just 3 to 5 per cent — end up supplying 20 to 35 per cent of all the value-added collaboration in a firm. These are not the loudest people in the building. They are simply the ones who said yes once, did it well, and were never given the option to stop.

When Help Becomes Expectation

This is the cost of being easy to work with. Flexibility, the first time, reads as competence and generosity. The fifth time, it reads as availability. By the twentieth time, it has quietly become an expectation — not written into any job description, never negotiated, but somehow binding. Cross and his co-authors note that the same researchers who once cheered the rise of cross-functional, collaborative work are now watching it curdle into a structural hazard. Collaborative time has risen by more than 50 per cent over the past two decades and, at many firms, now consumes roughly 80 per cent of the working week, leaving little room for the work people are actually evaluated on (see Figure 2).

What makes this especially worth a B-school audience’s attention is who tends to absorb it. The same body of research found that emotionally taxing, time-intensive helping — the kind that costs real bandwidth rather than just a quick answer — disproportionately lands on people already inclined to say yes, with a measurable gender skew in who gets asked and who gets credited for it. The favour economy, in other words, is not distributed by merit. It is distributed by whoever forgot to build a boundary.

The Invisible Tax

None of this is an argument against helping. Institutions like ours run substantially on informal generosity — the senior who makes the introduction, the batchmate who shares interview notes, the professor who makes time outside office hours. The point is narrower and more uncomfortable: goodwill, unmanaged, becomes a tax that falls hardest on the most capable and the most agreeable, while the ledger stays invisible to everyone except the person paying it.

The corporate world has started building instruments to make this economy visible — network maps, workload audits and the deliberate redistribution of ‘go-to’ status. B-schools have no such instrument yet. But the pattern is identical: the person who never says no eventually has no time left to say yes to the thing that was actually theirs.

The currency of favour and access will keep circulating either way. The only real choice is whether you spend it, or whether it spends you.