Here are the sources from this session, grouped by the part of your case each one strengthens. I've kept the primary sources (Bain, McKinsey, Wellington, the Fed reporting) and dropped the aggregators that were just repackaging them, so you can cite the original.
The strongest for you: the "work jamming" prior
This is the documented evidence that the thing you measure is real and large. It's general-corporate, not PE-specific, so cite it as the pattern, not as proof about any one company.
Bain, "Great Companies Obsess Over Productivity, Not Efficiency" — the average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity, more than a day each week, to what Bain calls "organizational drag," the structures and processes that consume time and stop people from getting things done. This is the closest thing to your thesis in print. https://www.bain.com/insights/great-companies-obsess-over-productivity-…
Bain, "HR's Vital Role in Time, Talent and Energy" — the average company loses 21% of its productive power to time-wasting interactions, and the best companies cut that loss by nearly half. https://www.bain.com/insights/hrs-vital-role-in-time-talent-and-energy-…
McKinsey, "Decision making in the age of urgency" — 61% of executives said at least half their decision-making time was ineffective, and just 37% said their organizations' decisions were both timely and high quality; McKinsey sizes the waste at roughly 530,000 days of managers' time a year at a typical Fortune 500, about $250 million in wages. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-perform…
Why operations is the lever now
These say the financial shortcuts are gone, which is what puts your kind of work on the table.
Wellington, "Impact of higher interest rates on private equity" — most PE returns in recent years came from multiple expansion, and with higher rates managers will need to rely less on financial engineering and more on revenue growth and operational improvements. https://www.wellington.com/en/insights/impact-of-higher-interest-rates-…
Commonfund, "The Rising Cost of Debt on Private Equity" — unable to drive value through leverage or multiple arbitrage, firms are turning to growth and operational improvement; PE exit value in 2023 was down about 73% in the US from its 2021 peak. https://www.commonfund.org/cf-private-equity/the-rising-cost-of-debt-im…
Why now: the pressure on aging assets
The "you can't wait this out" backdrop.
Bain, "Private Equity Outlook 2026: Gaining Traction" — about 32,000 unsold companies worth $3.8 trillion, distributions below 15% of NAV for four straight years, and IRR that starts to stagnate around year seven and declines after, with fund-level TVPI flattening after year eight. The IRR-decay line is your timing argument in their math. https://www.bain.com/insights/outlook-gaining-traction-global-private-e…
McKinsey, "Beating the odds: how PE firms can improve exit prospects" — a backlog of roughly 16,000 companies held longer than four years, 52% of buyout-backed inventory and the highest on record, with average holding periods at a historic 6.6 years. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/beatin…
CNBC, Fed decision June 17, 2026 — the Fed held at 3.5 to 3.75%, the new chair removed the language pointing to future cuts, and the projections shifted toward a possible hike. This is the "the rescue isn't coming" point. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/fed-interest-rate-decision-june-2026.ht…
One honest note so you don't get caught leaning too hard: the top group is the only one that directly measures the drag, and it's about large companies in general. The PE sources establish the pressure and the shift to operational value, but none of them prove jamming is the binding constraint on a specific aging portfolio company. That gap is exactly what your diagnostic closes, one measured company at a time. Want these dropped into a single reference doc you can keep, or is the list enough?