I don’t think that comparison makes sense. A GM of a sports team isn’t a dozen levels removed from the team and their target isn’t an ever changing field of competing goals. Changing out upper leadership at a technology company isn’t analogous to a general manager of a sports team.

Well I do think that systems and policies shape a company’s success much more than most people realize. Usually, a new exec comes in and they are given latitude over a particular domain of execution decisions, most especially who is making them, but not over any policies and procedures of management, because that is defined by HR. So they have no real power, and spend their time trying to understand what is going on from an external perspective, with no real understanding of the internal mechanisms that make the company work.

For instance, the microstructure of an organization is probably the most important element of success. Let’s say the board hires an exec to because they want to see project X succeed. New exec comes in, hires, fires, but it’s still the same low-level structure of engineers. So they set up a bunch of meetings where they get fed the same watered-down technical pablum that the old exec got, until they unsurprisingly come to exactly the same conclusions as the previous execs. The regime change was irrelevant and wasteful. The question they should have been asking is: “How is this organization failing to get the best ideas and the best work out of its people?” Almost always, it’s because they are being told to do stupid things, and the incentives are aligned to keep it that way. Hierarchies based on financial allocation are often to blame. If people’s jobs rely on a project budget, they’ll fight for it, no matter how stupid they know the project to be. Execs will never get the truth about anything. A lot of organizations start with matrix management to fight this, but functional managers are lazy, while project managers are aggressive, so authority always drifts toward financial hierarchies. This is corporate poison. Great organizations get the best out of their employees by constantly breaking up financial hierarchy.