If ego had a place in business, I would feel compelled to preserve it—much like a gambler addicted to betting on a single racehorse.
Ego protects the leader, not the business. Its insidious nature often leads owners to entrust key roles to unqualified individuals, serving two purposes: satisfying their desire to be “needed” by surrounding themselves with operators with weaker judgment, systems thinking, or scale experience, and ensuring their own involvement in daily operations to feel essential to progress.
When leadership chooses role-mismatched hires who can’t run the business operations, they cling to their poor decisions long after the evidence is clear. The outcome is predictable: operations slow, judgment erodes, and the business breaks from the inside out.