It is surprisingly easy to have this happen, often due to founder attention being elsewhere, metrics collection lagging major trapdoor decisions (like hiring), the costly behaviors feeling really success-inflected in the moment, locally-optimized decisionmaking, etc.
Example of locally-optimized decision making: if you hire an ambitious person and give them a budget for ads, it is highly likely that they will spend that budget for ads, even if your organization is not constrained by not having spent all the ad money.
Relatively few smart, ambitious people will write in their performance review “The best thing I could do this quarter was nothing and so I ruthlessly executed on doing nothing.”
(In an ideal world the person you’ve hired is an irrepressible polymath who seemlessly pivots into a job other than the one assigned to them even before management asks, but global supply of this sort of person is insufficient for a demand by a factor of at least 100.)
