If you are hiring and managing bad people, then the problem is not with them. It is with you. If you are unable to identify bad people under you, then you are failing at your most basic responsibility.
Personally, I've seen bad managers under good directors. It's complicated. Anyone can make a bad hiring decision. My point is that even if you are able to identity bad people under you, that identification process takes time. The higher you go in a hierarchy, the longer the time horizon you tend to be evaluated on. To say it should be obvious on a very short time horizon is disingenuous and only covers the most egregious cases.
Speaking from upper management, I don't care for managers who blame their employees when things go wrong. They should have replaced those bad employees before things went wrong. That manager is on the way out if he's working for me.
Bad managers will never admit they're bad; they have bad employees. It's really hard for upper management to tell the difference. The early signs of bad management look a lot like bad employee performance. It takes time for a pattern of behavior to emerge, and in the meantime projects and employees are getting ruined.
That said, traditional management, like democracy, is the worst form of management, except for all the others.