At startups, marketing and engineering (finding what the customer wants, and building it quickly) are what drives success. As firms grow, internal coordination becomes more important.
Success at "Making sure Excel is backwards compatible to every version of Windows and chip for the past 10 years, and has the same look and feel as every other Microsoft application" requires a lot of other skills: organizational design and management, project management, and (gasp!) even politics. The problem is when you reward those things, by default you disincent other things. Eventually people overjudge the political. But you need political skills to make things happen.
Success at "Making sure Excel is backwards compatible to every version of Windows and chip for the past 10 years, and has the same look and feel as every other Microsoft application" requires a lot of other skills: organizational design and management, project management, and (gasp!) even politics. The problem is when you reward those things, by default you disincent other things. Eventually people overjudge the political. But you need political skills to make things happen.