I find this take naive. First, to have a zero sum game or indeed a positive sum game you have to be playing with perfect information with rationally behaving actors. Given most organisations have high levels of uncertainty and are resource constrained you can’t rationally make positive sum game decisions as the interpretation of uncertainty is cardinal to it - and additionally the resource constraint means different views of that uncertainty will tend to bias towards the thing they know best - engineers will find more certainty in build, marketers in marketing, designers in design - take your pick.

This necessitates collaborative information synthesis to resolve uncertainty uniformly to then be able to play a positive sum game under constraints. This is possible but it necessitates exchange of information between different business functions.

As informational clarity is a communicative process with repetitive feedback cycles, it will tend to have a big delay in the overarching system of decision-making. Therefore a shortcut is to influence, i.e. use conviction processes to shorten the cycle, rather than repeat to arbitrary infinity in order to drive perfect information alignment.

Therefore influencing is a necessary component even in an otherwise perfectly healthy and incentive aligned positive sum system of rational actors - and politics are influencing.

The problem becomes when conviction isn’t used as shortcut for informational clarity but as a method of exploitation of irrationality of human actors - this is bad politics.

What I do agree with is that putting in place right incentives, processes and organisational structure minimises politics - and in an org with rational actors this is the goal.

But good luck hiring perfectly rational actors in each function, that will still behave rationally in an economic downturn :).