[FormerBandmate]

> All of that is a long-winded rephrasing of the old truism: it's not about what you know, but who you know.

This is how organizations die, political, corporate, non-profit, or any other type. People who are good at knowing other people frequently aren’t the best person for the job, and selecting for newcomers who are good at knowing other people over work leads to aristocrats and manipulative sociopaths taking over, and then you have GE, a company that lost its ability to innovate, could only copy hot trends popular among Wall Street poorly, moved into finance and oil despite having no expertise in these fields to the tune of billion dollar losses, and is now a mess in the process of being broken up and dissolved.

On a much greater scale, Putin’s Russia works a lot like this, which has led it to become an incompetent brutal dictatorship that terrorizes its citizens and also can’t even take over Ukraine, one of the poorest country in Europe and its direct neighbor, because everyone who was competent got pushed out or killed.