The productivity gap between countries.

In smaller minded circles, cities and communities, a large majority of the people you work with, will attempt to make themselves seem more important, their job harder & more complicated, on your account. On the account of the project.

Downstream this accumulates so badly that you can't really do complex projects with tens or hundreds of people, since they all try to signal how hard their job is, by making everything more difficult.

Imagine entire countries like that, and it becomes a bit clearer why things can fail catastrophically, and constantly. Why there is immense discrepancies between the output of countries, why for some it simply "works"