Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

Why is this so hard? And the follow up question - Why is this taking so long?  Make a peanut butter sandwich. 30 seconds.  Walk to and eat lunch. 1 hour.  Draft a project plan. 2 hours. With enough experience you become very good at estimating the time it takes to do basic things.  Enter into a large corporation.  Process a service request. Days.  Schedule a meeting. Weeks.  Build something in IT. Years. The successful manager is the one that can cut through the organization to get things done. Unfortunately, it's hard to get through the bureaucracy without getting some battle wounds and scars along the way. 

Bob Ross - You know who he is One of the biggest things lacking in enterprise software development is creativity.  I'm not talking about creativity during implementation. If there is one thing that all successful IT managers are good at, it's getting creative at getting their project plans executed in corporate bureaucracy.  I am talking about creativity in design and end user usability.  Since when did corporate IT become about compounding solutions that are good enough into solutions that are even more good enough? (And by good enough I mean that it simply works). What I've discovered in the last two years of IT project management is that IT departments in big companies have a mission to "keep the lights on."  Imagine you buy a new Honda Accord and your mission was to keep that thing running for as long as it can go. At some point, you'll upgrade it- but instead of upgrading to a Tesla, you'll upgrade it to another Honda Accord; maybe a few...