Yossi Kreinin’s June essay makes a claim about where work actually gets done: 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but that work only reaches its goals thanks to the under-5% who do things that someone else is supposed to do, but won’t.
He is not talking about volunteering. He is talking about the specific move of absorbing the blocking part of someone else’s job:
- Learn how the adjacent system works and what its owners need — the knowledge is the point, not charity
- When you ship something and the people it was built for don’t adopt it, integrate it into their system yourself, the way Intel’s team wrote support for their first 32-bit CPU into Microsoft’s compiler
- If a manager doesn’t actually manage, go to their people directly — without calling it managing and without taking credit
- If you need a feature, sending a patch is faster than waiting on a planning process that is already finalized for this quarter and the next
The reward is real but indirect: an organization broken enough to need this, but still healthy enough to appreciate it, will notice. So will you — you end up one of the few people who understands how the place works. His stated regret is the inverse: refusing to get into adjacent areas because they looked boring or “not my job,” then drowning in preventable problems that nobody else was ever going to fix.
Then the piece turns, and this is the useful half. Two moves look like the same instinct but are not:
- Building in-house instead of buying — not because it wins on merits, but because any expense is hard to approve while headcount is easy to grow
- Every department running its own version of a shared service rather than depending on a party that doesn’t report to them
Both feel like doing everyone’s job, and both get rewarded, because both add headcount. In reality they run in parallel to or instead of someone else’s work rather than unblocking it.
The distinction is worth keeping: do the job that is blocking you, not a duplicate of it.