Investors, CEOs, executives, supervisors, and all spend approvers must develop an objective investment effectiveness mindset to reverse their companies' productivity challenges. The first lever to drive productivity improvements is to embrace an opt-in mindset to curb wasteful investments. The second lever is to optimize human capital investment, which involves a fundamentals-focused recalibration of our labor force towards customer-centric work, skill-focused staffing, and reintroduction of up-skilling and performance management. An ability to connect every investment dollar to tangible intrinsic value creation for internal and external customers will characterize companies that can profitably and sustainably grow.