Resource Hoarding
Meanwhile, the team across the hall is working weekends because they can't hire fast enough. The budget that could solve their problem sits unspent in another department's reserve.
To give and live with honor: no greater profit exists. Valluvar places generosity at the center of a meaningful life. One team is drowning. One team has surplus. They’re in the same organisation. Your departments hoard people and budgets like wartime rations. Each team justifies its allocation as ‘minimum viable.’ Each defends its headcount as ‘barely sufficient.’ Meanwhile, the team across the hall is working weekends because they can’t hire fast enough. The budget that could solve their problem sits unspent in another department’s reserve.
Mondragon is a federation of 95 cooperatives in the Basque Country, employing 80,000 people. I found the research on their resource-sharing model remarkable. When one cooperative struggles, others redistribute profits to support it. During the 2008 financial crisis, Mondragon’s cooperatives voted to take pay cuts rather than lay off workers. Profits are capped: the highest-paid worker cannot earn more than 8 times the lowest-paid. Resource hoarding is impossible not because of rules but because of architecture: the system is designed so that one unit’s surplus is another unit’s lifeline.
Dams create upstream abundance by creating downstream scarcity. In ecology, a dam blocks the natural flow of a river. Upstream, water accumulates. Downstream, the ecosystem loses its water supply. The dam serves its operator while starving the ecosystem below it. Resource hoarding works identically: each department builds dams to protect its allocation. Behind the dam, resources accumulate unused. Downstream, other teams are resource-starved. The organizational river should flow to where it’s most needed. The dams prevent this. And the irony: most hoarded resources sit idle behind the dam, serving nobody.
Identify one resource your team has that another team needs. Lend it for one quarter. If the lending produces more value than the holding, the dam was an illusion. Give. And find that Valluvar was right about profit.
That blocked flow has a name. Resource Hoarding. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Hoarding was rational because the incentive structure punished sharing. Releasing headcount risked not getting it back. Lending resources received no credit. The system made generosity costly.
Navigate
Resource sharing is tracked and credited. Leaders who lend resources to other teams are recognized for organizational contribution.
Tool
CORE / Legacy: the framework that measures what a leader gives to the broader organisation. Legacy makes generosity visible and rewarded.
Implement
Lend one resource to another team for one quarter. If the lending produces more value than the holding, the dam was an illusion.
Emerge
When sharing is rewarded, resources flow to where they’re needed, organizational efficiency improves, and the dams that starve downstream teams dissolve.