Slack is great for resiliency, but it obviously can't be unbounded. The CEO in the article can't have 100 secretaries just in case. One of the great things about approaches like linear programming (programming in the sense of industrial engineering and not CS) is that it helps quantify how much that slack is worth. It can then be put into context of whether the risk tradeoff is worth the extra slack.
In a world where CEO time is apparently worth like 300X worker time, how many secretaries is the right number? I guess it is however many it takes to keep the CEO completely saturated with work...
That's exactly what my GP was commenting on. Instead of using heuristics like "however many it takes the CEO completely saturated with work" or assuming the CEO worth is 300x the secretary, you can quantify it. As soon as the value of the additional slack (organizational value or risk balance) is outpaced by the slack cost (secretary salary), you know you've added too much slack.
I'm not sure if this comment was meant tongue-in-cheek, but wouldn't this assume the administrative overhead scales on a linear 1:1 ratio with the CEO's value? If a engineer's value is 2x another's, it doesn't necessarily mean the former uses, say, 2x the electricity/copier machine/office space. But maybe that was your point and I'm being dense.
