Sometimes I call it the "Giant Robot Theory of The Presidency" -- that is, I suspect that occupying the white house is to no small extent a lot like climbing into the cockpit of a large and complex piece of anime mecha. It mediates your senses, your reality is "augmented" in a number of ways, you have information being fed to you from various subsystems. You're empowered, but you're also somewhat isolated by the cockpit, too, and it's easy to start to think about reality in terms of what the various feeds and subsystems are telling you and think about your actions largely in terms of the controls in front of you. Perhaps at first you focus that way because it's all so new and awesome and exciting, then later because you just got used to it while barely noticing how totally you accepted this interface to the world. Over time the system itself shapes your perceptions and thinking, and you think less like what you were before you climbed in and more like the system itself.
That's a colorful metaphor for saying that once you're in the leadership of an organization, you see like the organization does, because you "see" via the organization, but I think it adds something.
(BTW -- it's also true of everyone to some extent. It's a useful exercise to think about exactly what kind of mecha you've climbed into and how it's influencing you.)
I think this tendency may be more pronounced in organizations with strong mission-oriented and ends-justify-means cultures.. like, say military/defense/national security orgs, which we intentionally staff with people we train to set the value of human autonomy and even life (theirs and others) below various goals and "interests."