[kstenerud]

It depends a lot on where you end up. There are niches where you can live by market forces alone, and breeze through life being almost unaware of politics - but that's the exception.

For most people, politics will be a dominant force - if not THE dominant force - that they live or die by. Once more than 2 people are involved, you by definition have politics (albeit weak politics). It then grows slightly until it suddenly becomes much more important at about 150 people or so. By the time you're at 1000 it's a major force, and at 5000 it's the only force that matters anymore.

And even if it's not your organization that's this big, a small company selling to Amazon will only succeed if they know how to play Amazon politics.