The rush job nobody paid for

A customer asks whether the work can be done by Friday instead of the following Thursday. Someone in operations says it will be tight but yes. The invoice goes out at the standard rate. Nobody records that anything unusual happened, because from the inside it just feels like good service. What actually happened is that a scarce and valuable thing, position in the queue, was transferred to one customer at no charge, and the cost was distributed across everyone else and across the firm’s own margin. That transaction is invisible…