If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers. Now imagine you organized a department of 300 engineers to develop the right mix of infrastructure, forward-looking projects, and core projects such that the organization runs and grows efficiently. Now your incremental technical contribution is so much larger than the initial 10% that it's laughable.
This doesn't have to be limited to management, which is where I think the Google VP perspective falls a little flat. You can do this kind of work through pure technical contributions. I think managers write about this kind of leverage more often, but it can come from any kind of organization. A core library or tool has a massive impact, because it's reusable past the bounds of your team. Maybe you're change isn't 10% distributed across 30 people, but you could improve 3000 people by 1%.