> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete.
That's utter MBA bullshit, based on 19th century pseudoscience (Taylorism).
1. Employee's incentives are never 100% aligned with company interests. That's an aspirational goal at best. This means that each employee will be under constant stress of doing what's best for the company vs doing what's best for his career.
2. A side effect for #1 is that it is even more untrue that employee's incentives are aligned among each other's. Even disregarding power struggles between individuals, it is often the case that job roles are adversarial in nature (think programmers vs testers dichotomy). This mean that even if an employee does a set of actions at the job that achieve +90% efficiency for his role, he may be pushing innefficiencies to other peers' roles (and should be doing so, according to game theory).
3. Independently of #1 and #2, efficiency comes at the cost of flexibility. Working conditions for today are not going to be necessarily the same tomorrow; and optimizing for today, every day, will put you in a position that forces you to change gears constantly, which is "inefficient" in the overall scheme of things.
Personally, from my experience working a support role in HP, our manager strived for 80% resource utilization, - meaning we were strictly measured in our use of time, and if we were working more than 32 effective hours per week it was seen as a symptom of us either being undertrainned or our team being understaffed.
You may think that paying someone to just hang around one day per week doing nothing was "inefficient". It was not, all of our coffee breaks, rest-room breaks, smalltalk with peers, etc, came out of that budget, for starters. It was always very strictly measured, even more so because I was a contractor and therefore payed overtime at 2 or 3 times my normal hourly rate, depending on the particular hours I put it. And I can hardly think of a time I worked with more intense focus in my career.
And then, comes the issue of the emergency blackouts. One month before leaving that particular job, we had a catastrophic failure, where the recovery procedure itself failed and we had to jumpstart the mission critical system the long, hard way. It took 2 out of 7 people in my team to be devoted to that effort around the clock, and it would not have been humanly possible of the other 5 of us would not have had that 20% of slack to bear the blunt of the whole regular workload that was still expected from us during the time the brown-out lasted.