> On a few occasions, someone may suggest that I check out a project that could use my help, but nobody tells me what to do.

> I quickly learned that if I can’t get anyone else interested in the project that I want to work on, then either I poorly articulated my vision, or more likely, it does not benefit the company.

These appear to be the main points, so there is a kind of pressure to work on things that benefit the company.

My question is, how does overall strategy get set then? There are probably 1,000 things you could do to benefit the company, but only a small number of them have a huge effect, some of them require coordination to really help, and some of them might be diametrically opposed to each other.

Who makes these decisions, when there are multiple viable ways of going forward, but someone just has to put their foot down and decide which one?