This ignores the principle to avoid being constrained by illusionary local maxima. Why is the person still at a company where politics takes up 80% of day instead of "important" work? Although as other commentors have mentioned, climbing the corporate ladder to regional/country manager probably isn't the kind of success the author is talking abou.
Why there is politics? Because resources have to be optimized based on fuzzy future estimations and non deterministic outputs?
There is always politics but in smaller ventures its unimportant due to the bounded description of the end product and the simplicity of the teams vision.
Politics is more of an end result than a specific ooerational design of any business.
It is not that 80% is politics fir everybody but only for the decision makers with cross department visibility.
