The data pipeline is directive governance’s Achilles heel, not the decision-maker’s rationality.
Claiming directive governance assumes executives are homo economicus is a strawman nobody defends. Directive governance assumes bounded rationality, which is realistic. The real vulnerability: the quality of bounded-rational decisions is only as good as the data available. The pipeline depends on three conditions specific to directive governance: (1) compression at each layer preserves the relevant signal, (2) quantitative proxies correlate with underlying reality, (3) decisions and execution are cleanly separable. All three fail structurally in large tech, not because anyone is incompetent, but because the pipeline degrades below the threshold for adequate decision-making. Executives are satisficing on garbage input.