Model chain: band meeting hrs/wk × 46 working weeks × decision/planning share × cross-functional addressable share × (1 + prep) → the addressable surface the lever acts on. The full coordination surface is shown as context so the model reconciles with observable calendar reality; only the addressable slice is claimed.
Loaded-cost convention (disclosed): fully loaded = base annual salary × 1.4, grounded in BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026 (private-industry benefits = 30.1% of total compensation, ≈43% of wages), divided by 2,080 hrs/yr. Excludes facilities/IT overhead — deliberately a floor. Base compensation anchored to BLS OEWS (May 2024/2025).
Coordination share (Tier 2, range): 37% — McKinsey Global Survey 2019 (n=1,259), average time on decision-making, the conservative floor · 55% — Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023 telemetry, share of time communicating · 58% — Asana Anatomy of Work 2022 (n=10,624), "work about work." The three anchors measure different constructs; the spread is definitional, not a confidence interval. The high anchors are ceilings.
Meeting hrs/wk by band (Tier 2, conflicting): defaults are midpoints across telemetry/survey sources that disagree by ~2× (IC ~8, managers ~12–16, executives ~19–23 at the high end; other panels materially lower). Editable for exactly that reason. Supporting: executives report 2+ days/wk in group meetings; CEO time-use research (peer-reviewed, multi-country) finds >50% of time in meetings.
Ineffectiveness context (Tier 2, not a multiplier): 61% of executives say most decision-making time is used ineffectively (McKinsey 2019); 71% of senior managers rate meetings unproductive (HBR 2017, n=182); ~31% of meeting hours deemed unnecessary by attendees (2022 survey, n=632). Shown as context; deliberately not multiplied into the math.
The cascade (single-case anchor): one weekly executive-committee meeting generated ~300,000 support person-hours/yr (~150 FTEs) in a published telemetry case across 17 large corporations — a ~43:1 support ratio. Cited as evidence the visible calendar understates load; not used as a population constant.
Tier-1 anchored: compensation layers (BLS OEWS + ECEC) · CEO time-use (peer-reviewed, Journal of Political Economy 2020, n=1,114 — dated, multi-country, directional) · the Chief-of-Staff coordination role (Zhou et al. 2024, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies).
Modeling bridges, not observed data: seniority headcount splits per size band · CoS count per band · ad-hoc meeting counts · the per-band shape of coordination share (only the org-wide range is sourced).
No public benchmark exists for: the cross-functional addressable share, named goals per year, prep/follow-up overhead, decision latency, the fractional-attendance share, and the async-capture rate. Those stay as labeled assumptions you control — which is the point of this tool. Excluded by policy: the McKinsey "$250M" figure (a thought experiment in its primary source) and the "$37B wasted in meetings" lineage (apocryphal, 1989, unsourced).
Async netting: every attendance-hour moved async is charged 10 minutes of response time (1/6), deducted from both captured dollars and returned hours.