I think there's a psychological facet at play as well. It may well be statistically bad for the bottom line, but it's much easier for the day-to-day. Planning

I think there's a psychological facet at play as well. It may well be statistically bad for the bottom line, but it's much easier for the day-to-day. Planning things is hard, decomposing work is harder still, and making sure that the things you build are architected and organized in such a way that they can be planned and decomposed is the hardest yet; it's the same reason parallel programming is hard, I think (this, granted, all from a software perspective). So even if yes, it may be biting people in the long term, the short-termism is that it's way easier to get things done because you (as the exec) just ask one person to do the entire project, and they maintain all that complexity in their head, never needing to translate it out into shallower, noisier channels, and the 'difficulty overhead' of sound planning, architecture, management, and communication is avoided. The "I'll just do it myself" culture is really hard to escape from, too, because I think we feel more productive in it, even if we aren't (compared to an organization that effectively staffs work out, and has the staff to accommodate). Intuitively, you're doing all this work and your fingers are constantly flying across the keyboard. You've got so many commits in today. You feel a lot more powerful than you do writing up issues and stories, and asking for statuses. And at the same time, it's a lot easier than writing up issues and stories (ones that will be genuinely useful as planning and work items, at any rate). It's part of why hero-efforts remain pervasive, I think. And it's a kind of sunk-cost fallacy at the end of the day; you're so deep in it already that you may as well just put this one last little bit of effort in and finish it yourself, rather than waste all the time documenting and decomposing and planning so that you can better facilitate parallel, distributed work.