That fiction died since 2008. Companies cut back to the bone and never recovered. The "work smarter, not harder" was nothing but lip service for layoffs.
I don't know of one small, high-performing team that lasted longer than a year. Once one person left, often moving out and up, the small team couldn't find a replacement at that skill level. Since there wasn't an available pool of talent to pick replacements from, since everyone was in an understaffed team, the problems accelerated.
I witnessed entire teams disappear once the first person left. Their goals, objectives, everything, all got discarded or dumped on neighboring teams.
I'm going through it now where entire divisions are standing up and washing their hands of their own work, citing the inability to retain or attract talent. Corporate is telling the other divisions that they'll have to take over those tasks. So... now instead of having a division full of people in those careers who know who to hire and what experience to look for, we have separate divisions trying to find people with the same lack of success.
It's like telling a general contractor that the electricians quit so the carpenters are going to have to find electricians or do the work themselves.
Some of the recent failures have been spectacular. A smart manager will hold onto anyone they can, even if their four states away working remotely.
They need to be designed so that there is not a single point of failure and be interchangeable.
Good posts—skilled talent is priceless and rare.
Any company or manager that does not “get it” is doomed to failure.
I retired from a profession where there were only a handful of true “experts” in the entire country.
In addition we often had to call on outside experts in areas that affected us now and then. Part of our expertise was just knowing who they were—and building up relationships so that they would take our call. They in turn would call us when they needed our assistance.
As modern life gets more and more complex that is happening in many types of industries and businesses.