Could I restate your view as: Competition keeps orgs and people honest.

The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.

I think that is true... but man, if that was 100% of jobs? I don't think a lot of people would love that. You have to have a certain mindset to want to fail over and over again until someday you fail upward.