I should set the record straight. In my experience, later-stage senior leaders can be tremendously helpful, and I currently work with a few that make my life much easier. But if they wrote an article where they took credit at someone else's expense (either their manager, or even their predecessor, like: "it was really bad until I arrived"), I would be disappointed in their lack of understanding of the big picture.

The first wave of people you hire are very strong in certain areas (eg: pain tolerance, imagination), and very weak in others (organization, social skills). It turns out that in the first year, the pain tolerance is a lot more important than organizational skills, and that first wave of people didn't care about certain things, like an employee handbook, performance reviews, etc - all they wanted to do is get shit done. Eventually, things flip, and suddenly we find ourselves spending an entire week doing 360 reviews and similar work. The new people who join the company notice that the 360 reviews are not sufficiently streamlined, and they bring this to the attention of the newly hired chief people officer. That person takes a look at the problem and fixes it. At that point, the story should be delivered as follows: "the company decided that it was the right time to invest in this process, and this is how we did it." That sounds a lot different than "it was a mess and I fixed it."

There seems to be a parallel with open source projects too.

What works for small projects may not work for large ones.

Equally the overhead of managing a large project will kill most ones if done from the start.

I've personally found that the only people in suits you can trust are suit salesmen.