In most companies I've worked, approval process is the scar tissue of years of mistakes. In every case where you need to ask for approval to do something, you can probably trace back in the company's history and find the past mistake that some goofball made that necessitated getting approval to do something like that. Someone got us sued. Someone lost us some money. We need to take some kind of corrective action and the easiest solution is to simply require oversight next time.
A place where you can "do whatever you want" strikes me as a place with a very short history of mistakes.
A place where you can "do whatever you want" strikes me as a place with a very short history of mistakes.