Arguably, given politics is how we reconcile diverging interests, it is what you get when people are not aligned to the same principles. When you have peers wit

Arguably, given politics is how we reconcile diverging interests, it is what you get when people are not aligned to the same principles. When you have peers without clear principles, you have politics. Poor leadership causes people to reach for whatever tools they can find to ensure their personal interests prevail. In a startup if you have politics, it is because you don't have direction and you are basically burning cash while everyone re-negotiates how they relate to one another at each new interaction. If you are in a company that is political without being profitable, I suspect they're already dead and would use it as a platform to get your next gig and split. If it is profitable and political, I would opt to take cash, as their stock will have more downside than upside because they are optimizing for survival not growth. No politics and no profit? Probably a cult. Profitable with no politics? Sell everything you own to buy options. In a large company, you are basically the minder of capital or assets, with survival and continuity prioritized over growth. When it stops growing at a sufficient rate, it's going to stop producing value and growth and enter a cycle of pathological optimization. Setting people against one another in this fixed resource environment is economical when you have a stable business that needs optimization. Fittest survive, etc. But for growth, that misalignment just creates massive opportunity cost. Where you have managers sitting on a pile of capital with no sense of how to grow it, they end up operating a death spiral as they switch from the growth strategy they were not equipped for, to more familiar optimization strategies. Management anti-patterns are the effect of incentives, and clear leadership (vision, direction, alignment) has the ability to resolve those. Leadership obviates politics, and in places where it's good, people know what is expected of them and others, and where they fit in. For this reason, I think professional managers often don't belong in startup environments because they are trained to optimize for fitness and not growth.