"The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company." - Steve Jobs

He said this for companies that become monopolistic. As can be seen by what happened after famous founders left their respective companies. Walt Disney leaving Disney, Steve Jobs leaving Apple, Akio Morita leaving Sony.

The company shifts from an innovation machine to a sales magnet.

Numbers make up the core of the company, and ingenuity, the specific quality, that made the company great, is lost in bureaucracy.