Right now, in your company, someone is manually doing what a system should be doing.
Probably several someones. They’re reconciling two data sources that should agree and don’t. They’re translating between two departments that share a handoff but not a language. They’re updating the CRM after the fact because the integration broke months ago and fixing it never made anyone’s sprint. They’re compensating for a broken onboarding process through sheer, personal, unsustainable attention.
And here’s the detail that makes this a chapter instead of a footnote: you gave every one of them an excellent performance review.
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I call it the absorption economy, because it is an actual economy. It has supply: your organization’s dysfunction, produced fresh daily. It has currency: the discretionary effort of your most conscientious people. And it has a product — the appearance of a functioning company.
It operates entirely alongside the official economy. It appears on no report, no org chart, no budget. The official economy runs on salaries and software. The absorption economy runs on people staying late to make sure nobody ever finds out the official economy doesn’t quite work.
You have two economies. You only manage one of them. The other one manages you, and it invoices in burnout.
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Notice *who* does the absorbing, because it isn’t random.
Broken systems don’t distribute their weight evenly. They find the people who will carry them — the ones who physically cannot watch a ball drop, who feel a system gap the way other people feel a draft. The conscientious ones. The Susans, before they’ve fully become Susan. Dysfunction migrates toward whoever will absorb it, with the reliability of water finding a low point.
And the reward for absorbing well? More to absorb. Handle the broken handoff once and it’s yours forever — we established that rule in Chapter 3, and here it is again, functioning as a promotion system. In the absorption economy, competence is taxed. The rate goes up every year, and the tax is collected in evenings.
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Now the sentence this chapter is named for.
Leadership looks at these people and reaches for hero language. *She’s a superhero. He just makes it work. I don’t know what we’d do without her.* I want you to listen to that language with fresh ears, because it is not describing a superhero. It is describing an adhesive.
Applied to a crack. Holding together two things that were never properly joined. Replaced only when it fails.
Your high performers are not superheroes. They’re duct tape. And duct tape — this is the part that matters — duct tape doesn’t fix anything. It postpones. The crack is still there, spreading quietly underneath, while the tape gets another glowing review for its grip strength.
This is not high performance. This is masking with better credentials. The company looks functional for exactly the same reason I looked composed in Chapter 1: because someone is spending enormous private energy making the gap invisible — and the invisibility is precisely why it never gets fixed. Absorbed pain never reaches the people who could authorize the repair. Your best employees are standing between you and the information you need most.
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Every hero story in your company is a systems bug report, filed as praise.
You don’t have a bench of superheroes. You have an absorption economy with a payroll.
The next section is the bill.