The Ten-Trillion-Dollar Subtraction

We chase competitive advantage by adding, and squeeze it out by cutting — harder every year. Meanwhile, a ten-trillion-dollar saving sits in plain sight, growing, untouched, because it points the other way.

In 2021, a behavioural scientist named Leidy Klotz handed people a small Lego structure: a platform held up by a single corner pillar, a roof hovering above it, unsupported on one side. Make it sturdy enough to hold a brick, he said. One stipulation: adding a  piece of Lego cost a little money; removing one was free.

Almost nobody removed anything. They braced, buttressed and propped — added a second pillar, a third — when the cleanest, cheapest fix was to pull the one pillar out and lower the roof onto the base. Across eight experiments, Klotz and his colleagues at Virginia found the same reflex, and published it in Nature: when we set out to improve something, we reach for more, and almost never for less. They named the habit additive bias. Adding springs to mind instantly. Subtracting takes deliberate effort — so most of us never get there.

Hold on to that Lego bridge, because it describes almost everything we currently call strategy.

Two roads to advantage — and we've worn both smooth.

Ask how a business gets ahead and you'll hear two answers, both additive in spirit.

The first is add. New capability, new tools, new platforms, new markets. The headline act today is artificial intelligence: the world will spend around 2.6 trillion dollars on it in 2026 alone, up forty-seven per cent in a single year. Whatever you make of that number, notice the direction of travel — outward, upward, more. That is where the entire market is looking for its edge.

The second road is cut. And we are cutting harder than ever — for thinner and thinner returns. Cost reduction is no longer a crisis response; it's permanent. In Deloitte's global cost surveys, around nine in ten companies say they'll run cost-reduction programmes over the next two years, whatever their financial weather. Yet the well is running dry: in 2024, 82 per cent of companies missed their cost-reduction targets — up from 72 per cent the year before. We're drawing on it more often and getting less each time. Squeeze again and you start cutting muscle.

So the two familiar routes to advantage are either expensive (add) or increasingly exhausted (cut). Which raises a question almost nobody asks: is there a third?

The Third Way.

Every year, Gallup measures not what the workforce is capable of, but how it actually behaves — how engaged, present, defended or checked-out people are. The 2026 figure is the largest on record: disengagement now drains around ten trillion dollars a year from the world economy in lost productivity. Roughly nine per cent of global GDP. Engagement has fallen to twenty per cent, its lowest since 2020, with the sharpest decline among the managers who set the weather for everyone below them.

And here is the part that ought to change the conversation: the number is climbing. Gallup's estimate has risen from 7.8 trillion dollars in 2022 to 8.8, to 8.9, and now to around 10 trillion — the steepest jump yet.

Engagement has slid from a peak of twenty-three per cent to twenty, the first time Gallup has ever recorded two consecutive years of decline. So while we pour more into the add column and squeeze ever harder on the cut column, the cost of how people behave continues to rise. The two levers everyone is pulling aren't even touching the biggest number.

Read that as a cost and it's merely depressing. Read it as a saving and it becomes the largest unclaimed prize in business — because lost productivity isn't spent money. t is recoverable, it is, quite literally, money left on the table.

The money on the table.

Spread that ten trillion across the world's 3.4 billion workers and it comes to close to three million dollars of lost output for every 1,000 people on a payroll, every single year — and in high-wage economies, where each head is worth far more than the global average, materially more again.

No new system bought that loss. No market expansion is required to recover it. It is simply the price of how people are behaving — and it is available to any business willing to go and claim it.

We cut, but we should subtract.

Here's the objection that arrives next, and it's a fair: isn't this just cutting by another name? Both moves remove something. But cutting and subtracting are opposites — and the difference is the point.

Cutting removes a positive. A cost buys you capacity — people, programmes, capability. Cut it and the expense line falls, but so does what you can do. You end up cheaper and smaller. At best the ratio improves; at worst, where most cutting now lives, you take out muscle and capability drops faster than cost.

Subtraction removes a negative. Defensive behaviour in an organisation’s gets you nothing; it is a drag that takes things away — candour, speed, output, trust, opportunity. It is a minus already sitting inside the system. Remove a minus and the total goes up. Two negatives making a positive.

So: cutting is a move to afford by removing; subtraction is a move to add by removing. One makes you lighter. The other makes you smaller.

And the two pull against each other. Every round of cuts raises the threat level in the building, and threatened people grow more guarded, more defensive, more checked-out — which is precisely the behaviour that costs the ten trillion dollars. Cutting tends to manufacture the very drag that subtraction removes.

Which is why decades of relentless cutting have walked straight past this saving: it doesn't appear on the page they're reading. Defensive behaviour has no line item. There is no budget called "the things we don't say to one another." You cannot cut it. It can only be subtracted — by changing the behaviour, not trimming a cost.

Why the prize goes unclaimed.

So why does a saving this size sit untouched — and growing — while we pour trillions into the add column? Two reasons, and the second perhaps is the hardest to admit.

The first is that claiming it requires subtraction, and subtraction doesn't come to mind. This is additive bias scaled to the enterprise: even when we aim squarely at behaviour, we still reach for more, not less. Organisations spend some 366 billion dollars a year on leadership and management training — then rate three in four of those programmes "not very effective." We add a workshop rather than remove the pattern that made the workshop necessary; a values poster rather than the naming of the unspoken rule it's papering over. We add, and add, and the drag stays exactly where it was.

The second reason is that we have never had a reliable way to change behaviour in the first place. The proof is in the failure rate. McKinsey finds that roughly 70 per cent of organisational transformations fall short of their goals — and, more tellingly, that the thirty per cent success rate "hasn't budged" through years of study. The cause isn't ignorance: by McKinsey's own account, leaders generally already know what needs to be done. The wall is the distance between knowing and doing — between resolving to behave differently and actually doing it. That gap is the one problem the entire corporate toolkit has never cracked.

Which is why the answer was never going to be another thing to install. The ten-trillion-dollar saving lives in what you can take away: the protective habit at the top that makes honesty unsafe beneath it; the conversation nobody will start; the defended pattern quietly taxing every meeting. Remove one of those and the productivity it was eating comes straight back — no purchase order required.

Back to the title.

So — why do we add to subtract? Because adding feels like advantage. It looks like investment, momentum, doing something. Subtraction feels like loss, even when it is plainly the gain. So we spend on the add column, squeeze the cut column, and walk straight past the one move that would return more than either: taking something away.

The biggest number in business right now isn't the 2.6 trillion we're spending to get ahead.

It's the ten trillion we're losing because of how employees in your business behave — about three million for every thousand people you employ, and rising every year — sitting there, waiting for someone to subtract.