One fun experiment would be for a company to place all it's middle managers on gardening leave. For a year. Give them the same ability to influence as that of a very minority shareholder (i.e. none).

Then see how the bottom line fares. I see three outcomes:

  1. Profits are down. Those managers added value after all.
  2. Profits about the same. Those managers added nothing.
  3. Profits up!! Those managers were dragging them down the whole time. Who knew?

Letting highly paid employees go is, of course, expensive. But in 2 out of those 3 scenarios the company can afford to simply keep them on gardening leave indefinitely.