Yes, my experience is very different than yours. But I have seen companies of all sorts. First of all, lets define good people: Happy employees, who are engage

Yes, my experience is very different than yours. But I have seen companies of all sorts. First of all, lets define good people: Happy employees, who are engaged with their work, have the skills and the tools to do their job, and have a management team invested in their success. These are not clichés. Very broken companies have bad people and bad process controls, or no documented process at all. If such a company is small, it may last for a while, but it is inevitably doomed. Slightly better companies have bad people and good processes. By that, I mean they have reasonable process controls and accountability, but no program in place to ensure that they have the right butts in the right seats, and nothing in place to keep their employees happy and engaged. They are proactive as regards to process, but reactive as regards to people. This is probably the center of the bell curve. Better companies have programs and hiring practices to ensure that they have and keep good people. But they may not yet have well-defined and enforced processes. If the company is small, they will probably do well. Process controls often come with growth. Better still are companies have good people and well defined and enforced processes. But they don't have a culture of continuous improvement which is always looking for ways to improve, be more efficient, etc. But the best companies of all have good people, and good process, but are constantly working to keep their people happy and engaged, and are constantly optimizing their processes to do more work for the same effort. Such companies are not exactly unicorns, but they are not common either.