I wish that the private companies I’ve worked for were ruthlessly efficient amoral profit-optimizing machines. At least then one would be able to make some kind of sense of management decisions. Once companies reach a certain size, decision making tends to be extremely messy and political. I can’t count the number of decisions I’ve seen made that were obviously going to be bad for the bottom line. This is especially so in VC-backed companies, where a lot of what’s being worked on is pure nonsense that serves only to provide material for an elaborate story-telling exercise designed to separate rich fool from money in the next funding round.