Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

Your company is running at 44% of its human potential. Here's what that costs

16 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:10

In this presentation, Ashish Kothari argues that organizations dramatically underutilize their human capital, operating at less than 50% efficiency compared with 70%+ for physical assets. He breaks down the loss into three categories: availability losses (10‑20% from attrition and absenteeism), performance losses (25‑50% from disengagement, lack of meaning, stress, conflict, and meeting overload), and quality losses (5‑10% from decision fatigue and distraction). For a typical medium‑sized S&P‑listed company, these inefficiencies translate into $228‑$355 million of lost productivity each year. Kothari frames the issue not as a “people problem” but as a systemic problem that requires organizational‑wide optimization, similar to how machines are tuned.

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If I told you one of your production lines was running at 44% efficiency, you would stop everything and fix it. But that is exactly what is happening with your people right now. Our research shows organizations are operating at less than 50% of their human capital potential. Compare that to 70% plus for physical assets we expect. The machines get optimized, the people get a wellness app. Here is what the 50% losses look like in practice. Availability losses from attrition and absenteeism can erode 10% to 20% of human capital value. Performance losses from disengagement, lack of meaning, stress, conflicts with colleagues, and meeting overload can erode another 25% to 50%. Quality losses from decision fatigue and distraction take away another 5% to 10%. For a medium-sized S&P company, these losses can amount to $228 to $355 million in lost productivity annually. The gap between current state and full potential, that is not a people problem. That is a systems problem.