[bane]

Quite a lot of work that's not immediately obvious as useful is producing defensive material.

It's a different story to say "we analyzed a market and decided against pursuing those opportunities because of x, y and z" (an activity that produces lots of shelves full of reports) than to say "we didn't pursue some opportunities and we never bothered to look into it" (an activity that never occurred because nobody was filling shelves with reports).

"Give me everything we know about foo" is only possible if somebody has been collecting shelves full of things over time.

[TeMPOraL]

Basically, if someone asks you something, you can throw more PDFs at them than they have patience to read, in order to make them go away?

[bane]

And without the PDFs on a shelf somewhere, you have nothing to throw.