Jim Rembach’s Amazon Best Seller applies cost-of-quality logic to people spending, so finance and HR can see first purchases and repurchases together.
GREENSBORO, NC, UNITED STATES, November 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Since Joseph Juran introduced quality costs in his 1951 Quality Control Handbook, management accounting has had a way to separate money spent preventing defects from money spent repairing them after the fact. The Drift Tax: Why Organizations Pay Twice for the Same Performance and How to Stop borrows that logic and applies it to people spending. The book’s starting point is one question for every dollar meant to fix, repair, mediate, or restore performance: “Did we already pay for the capability this spend is replacing?”
Author Jim Rembach, Executive Director of the Leadership Execution Institute, offers the question for the weeks when 2027 budgets are approved. LEI Press published the book on October 12, 2026, and two days later it earned Amazon’s Best Seller badge in two Management & Leadership categories.
What does the question look like in practice?
The book’s composite case starts with a strong hire. A company of about 1,100 employees authorizes a $240,000 package for a vice president of operations to lead across departments. Eight months in, a supply chain analyst flags a bottleneck between procurement and fulfillment on a weekly call. The vice president asks a clarifying question, suggests the two departments work it offline, and moves to the next agenda item. Rembach puts the exchange at eleven seconds. Three weeks later the company pays a consulting firm $80,000 to redesign the same handoff.
“This next part is not a story about a bad executive,” Rembach writes. Almost everyone involved, the book notes, would make the same hire again. The case is about what the environment around the role was built to hold.
Why doesn’t the second payment show up in one place?
The consulting fee was booked as process improvement, the expedited freight as logistics variance, and the chief executive’s mediation hours not at all. The vice president’s pay continued in a separate budget line approved in a different year. “Nobody, at any point, described any of this as paying twice,” Rembach writes.
The book traces the pattern to sound accounting rather than to a lapse. The root cause stays invisible “not because the accounting fails, but because the accounting works,” Rembach writes. Each fragment lands in a legitimate line and is explained in that department’s own vocabulary.
Is this a failure of finance?
The book says it is not. It cites McKinsey research in which more than half of CFOs said transformations now consume the largest share of their time, and roughly 7 in 10 named organizational buy-in and human behavior as the main barrier to those transformations sticking. “The pattern is not a failure of finance,” Rembach writes. “It is what it looks like when an entire management era reaches the edge of what its operating system can hold.”
What can finance and HR add to the usual metrics?
Completion rates and satisfaction scores do what they were built to do, Rembach notes. They confirm that a program happened and that people valued it. They were not built to show whether the behavior it taught still holds months later. The book offers several instruments for that question, and two suit a budget review. The Repurchase Audit sorts the last 24 months of people-related spending into first purchases and repurchases. The Compounding Signals Check asks four questions, starting with who caught the last problem before it surfaced. A team can score poorly on those signals while every official metric is green, the book notes.
Who has endorsed the book?
“Jim has named the most expensive line item missing from every P&L, and the costly decisions based on that information,” said James K. Weeks, Ph.D., Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNC Greensboro. “He explains how execution failure stems from the erosion of systems and standards and the Kinetic Chain of Execution, even for great teams.”
Where can finance and HR begin before budgets close?
One statement in the book’s Drift Tax Diagnostic asks whether an organization can tell which people-spending buys new capability and which buys back capability it already paid for once. The diagnostic takes a few minutes, is free at diagnostic.thedrifttax.com, and returns an Exposure Report. The book suggests colleagues take it individually and compare readings. “Where the numbers disagree is where the conversation is,” Rembach writes.
Hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions are sold through Amazon and major retailers. Excerpts are at www.thedrifttax.com.
About The Drift Tax
The Drift Tax: Why Organizations Pay Twice for the Same Performance and How to Stop, by Jim Rembach, is published by LEI Press and was released October 12, 2026, in hardcover (ISBN 979-8-90589-141-0), paperback (ISBN 979-8-90589-140-3), ebook (ISBN 979-8-90589-139-7), and audiobook (ISBN 979-8-90589-142-7). It is about the hidden taxes organizations pay when their people drift, causing execution failures, and how to stop paying them. www.thedrifttax.com
About Jim Rembach
Jim Rembach is the Executive Director of the Leadership Execution Institute and President of Execution Architects, where he helps organizations design and implement the scaffolding needed to upgrade their operating systems for the post-AI era. He is the author of The Drift Tax and the host of the Fast Leader Show, where he has interviewed hundreds of the world’s most influential management thinkers. He spent three decades inside complex operations before writing the book. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
About LEI Press and the Leadership Execution Institute
LEI Press is the publishing division of the Leadership Execution Institute, an independent research organization studying leadership behavior, behavioral drift, and culture-calibrated execution systems in modern organizations. The institute’s research briefs, reports, and publications are available at leadershipexecutioninstitute.org.
Review copies and interviews are available on request.
Emma Allen
Leadership Execution Institute
+1 336-202-1032
press@leadershipexecutioninstitute.org
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