> Other executives were afraid of the new VP. Not because he was inherently evil, quite the contrary, but the pure existence of his new role meant intermeddling with their own topics to them. Something executives tend to dislike.

How could you possibly know that they were "afraid"? More likely, a group of people just had an abrupt re-org with little-to-no input and now had a new poorly-defined internal "digital" group that failed to provide clear direction on how it was going to replace an existing 3rd-party process. If worked suddenly ground to a halt and the new department was the only thing that changed, maybe existing leadership wasn't the problem?

> Without any real support from any other executive, our poor VP was tasked the impossible: digitalize the enterprise... but without any decision making power outside of his own department.

What about the other poor VP's? How did this new digital VP engage with them, individually and as a leadership team, to ensure that this new department had a well-structured process by which it provided value to the company? Did this new department try to lead the agenda, or simply steer it? You should be aiming to provide a service, not expect service from others.

> Executives went full enrage when they heard about what we did there

Well, yeah? This reinforces my opinion that the new department completely failed to engage the company. I'm sure the executive leadership team had more important things it wanted accomplished. How did adding Phoenix LiveView to an existing mess of a stack add value to the company in a way that aligns with existing objectives? Was the digital VP even consulted on this decision?

It's also possible leadership at the top, a CEO/founder, didn't know how to manage an executive leadership team and the dysfunction went too deep for a VP to fix. If the leadership team isn't meeting regularly and on the same page and collaborating with the CEO to determine a roadmap, then something is very wrong. You can't fix bad communication between leadership stakeholders that can't decide amongst themselves what priorities are.

> they wouldn't even come up with such ideas on thir own

You're telling me that a group of people that had been successfully making demands of 3rd-party contractors and companies couldn't do the same of an internal team? I don't buy it. How did they get to such a tangled mess in the first place?

> there are sometimes no other options than doing it as we did

Maybe so, but how did you bring along other stakeholders in this decision-making process? I wouldn't tolerate this attitude from a contractor/freelancer, or a full-time employee. A big part of leadership is convincing others of the value of a certain path, and failure to do that isn't the fault of the other party.

> Without toplevel commitment, best efforts and even results don't matter.

Yes. In the vacuum of clear leadership direction, other people will find opportunity to fill the empty void with work. But separate leaders working in isolation, even creating one-hit-wonders, will never be successful as a team collaborating on even a mediocre agenda.

> When there just is no interest in actually improving things, I should leave it at that.

I don't believe this for a second. Either there was complete absence of top-level leadership, or the new department wasn't structured to service the business and failed to build the confidence of other stakeholders that it could deliver value. I see a lot of blaming the other guy, and very little other actual introspection other than "without including all people affected by this".