If you have other people working at your company or investors, politics will come into play.

It's rare to have a CEO that can decide things 100% by themselves and still retain talented employees. It's also super rare to have investors with zero desire to determine a company's direction.

On that level, there are other policies.

Politics in standards bodies, industrial organisations, regulatory issues, funding and investment, etc

I’ve been on both sides of the table. To me, all of those are far more palatable than petty company politics (both in BigTech and startups).

When I've reported to founders they were front and center in the politics (which is probably how it should be).

Becoming a career CEO might be a way out, though.

A fish rots from the head down.

Yeah, and you can also get rid of local politics by moving to the countryside and homesteading. And you can bypass national politics by homesteading on a ship or an island that nobody cares about. And you can just move to a different planet to escape global politics. But any group of people will develop some form of politics, and to do anything meaningful longterm, you need a group of people, not just an individual, why not get better at politics? It is inevitable you will have to take part in them.

But of course, I still want my hut in the woods.