Leaders often fail to create clarity not out of malice, but because it is intellectually difficult and politically risky. Setting clear priorities forces tough trade-offs and can make some teams feel less important, which threatens a leader's own narrative and sphere of influence.

Work expands to fill time, and organizations expand to fill available work. People instinctively want to hire direct reports to increase their status, creating a supply of labor that then invents low-value tasks to justify its existence, leading to bloat and inefficiency.

Friction between teams often arises from deeply misaligned values, not just personality clashes. A "move fast" team measured by DAUs will inevitably conflict with a "reliability" team measured by uptime SLAs. True alignment requires shared goals, not just shared projects.

As companies scale, the supply of obvious, valuable work dwindles. To stay busy, employees engage in "hyper-realistic work-like activities"—tasks that mimic real work (e.g., meetings to review decks for other meetings) but generate no value. It's a leader's job to create a sufficient supply of *known valuable work*.

Intentionally assigning fewer people to a project than seems necessary forces extreme focus on the highest priorities. Overstaffing is "poison" because it breeds politics, encourages work on non-essential tasks, and creates cruft that slows the entire company down.

A key, often overlooked, function of leaders in high-growth groups is to act as a shield against internal company interference. This allows their teams to focus on innovation and execution rather than navigating organizational friction, which is a primary driver of top talent attrition.

Many leaders fight bureaucracy like an external threat. The real cause is the organization's design: too many layers, functional silos, and distant decision-making. To fix bureaucracy, you must fundamentally change the organizational structure, not just treat symptoms.

Highly skilled teams will repeatedly fail if the surrounding organizational structure—decision-making, governance, silos—is dysfunctional. The root cause of failure is often not the team's ability but systemic issues that must be addressed at a leadership level for anyone to succeed.

Drawing on personal experience, Jonathan Lewinsohn argues that office politics are "deadly" to organizations. He was a better investor when he could focus solely on investing, not internal positioning. A flat, transparent structure is a competitive advantage that eliminates this drag.