The thing about business principles is that they are either overfitted and not generalizable or they're over generalized and sound like, "just hire the right people"
Using words like "overfitted" and "generalizable" dress business philosophy in the language of math and tech, which it does not deserve (I do understand you were using them metaphorically). In reality, business philosophy is almost entirely devoid of formal rigor. IIRC, in Good to Great, Collins profiles 11 companies and attempts to conceptually "regress" (now I'm doing it) the factors that made them great. i.e. n=10. And their "greatness" was point in time. We're more than 20 years on from its publication and we can see that some of those companies weren't so great (looking at Circuit City). But I digress. My point is, its basically all just a narrative fallacy [1]. I'm inclined to believe that it was probably one person or a small handful of people within those companies that compelled them to greatness, and the MBA historian types come in afterward to try to distill processes, philosophies, etc. that explain away the individual bc an individual is not very repeatable. You can't teach "be Elon Musk" at business school. You can't sell consultancy engagements when the answer is, "oh, you basically need to have Jack Welch at the top". You can, however, sell and teach the Conjoined Triangles of Success!
1) There is no reason to believe that the causes of a company's success are entirely in control of the company. Take Nvidia - they are making absurd amounts of money out of the AI boom. It is clear they are doing it on purpose. But the only opportunity to do that is in a fairly small window from 2010 -> 2040. A company doing the same thing in 2000 would have failed to make insane profit, a company doing the same thing in 2050 will be hit by commodity economics and also make more limited profits. And if other companies had foreseen a market for linear algebra opening up a large chunk of the profits could well have evaporated before the market even started.
2) A company is complex and quite possibly nobody knows what is going on inside them. That undermines the ability of anyone - especially an outsider - in distilling how and why things work.
> I'm inclined to believe that it was probably one person or a small handful of people within those companies that compelled them to greatness
Very likely indeed. If it requires more than a handful of people, it is in fact hard to see how it would happen. Most companies are drawing from the same pool of employees so statistically they have to be fairly similar on average. Differences are driven by processes which are typically set up by a few key people.
