Company-wide global initiatives tend to get diluted through review and consensus-building into a "bland mediocre middle" that offends no one and excites no one. By contrast, opinionated founders who care intensely about specific, even quirky, details can have an outsized positive effect on the whole organization — their taste propagates further than a rolled-out policy ever could.
Company-wide initiatives regress toward a bland, mediocre middle specifically because they're designed to survive broad, cross-functional criticism — surviving criticism, not producing a sharp result, becomes the implicit optimization target. Concentrated, opinionated ownership of one specific detail, by contrast, can produce outsized positive spillover precisely because it isn't optimized for consensus. This suggests that seeking consensus at scale is itself a design failure mode, not a neutral or safe default.