Every line in your budget has survived an argument. The $300 seat license got questioned in a comment thread. The $40,000 renewal got three meetings and a procurement review. The offsite got a spreadsheet with two scenarios. Somebody, somewhere, defended every dollar your company plans to spend this year.

Except the biggest one. The biggest one has never been in the room.

Part of the reason is that it appears on no budget. The bigger reason is that it wears the costume of a virtue. Collaboration is on the values wall, in the job descriptions, in every performance review. Question a $40,000 renewal and you look responsible. Question a recurring meeting and you look like someone who does not want to be a teammate. A cost that gets classified as a virtue never gets audited, and this one has been compounding behind that immunity for a decade.

Then somebody priced it. The Collaboration Tax report from Paciva, models the cost at about $13,500 per employee per year, built from findings like 275 interruptions landing on the average knowledge worker every day, five working weeks a year lost to switching …