We don't optimize for what matters most—we optimize for what's easiest to measure and display. The most valuable work is often invisible to the systems that distribute rewards, so we abandon it for work that shows up on dashboards.
The people most qualified to give advice are often the worst at giving useful advice. Their success came from context-specific advantages they've forgotten existed, leaving them to teach universal principles that only work for people who already have what they had.
We believe talent rises to the top. But meritocracy isn't a system that rewards merit—it's a system that defines merit as whatever correlates with success, creating a circular logic that legitimizes any distribution of outcomes as deserved.