Employees are rarely a JIT component of a strong, healthy business. Good businesses have a little fat so that they can expand or react to changing market condit

Employees are rarely a JIT component of a strong, healthy business. Good businesses have a little fat so that they can expand or react to changing market conditions. Make the teams too lean and then you're at constant risk of losing a key member and watching all that institutional knowledge walk out the door. And that's if you treat employees well. Treat them like expendable cogs in the machine and your churn will be higher than industry average and you'll end up being less efficient. Think of why the body has tons of leukocytes roaming around, just looking for viruses to whack. If your body had to wait for an infection before creating leukocytes, you'd die pretty quickly.