Well put it this way: you're 65, you've led a few companies but now sit on 10-15 corporate boards of multi-billion dollar companies in your spare time, flying around the world for the meetings, there's another 10 people like you in the room, you're meeting the consultants and management after a long lunch (possibly boozy), you have a hunch about why the company is losing sales, but then the consultants put forward this extraordinarily well documented case of why there's 6 other explanations which combined have led to the decline in sales. So you doubt yourself, a little bit. There ARE after all 400 slides in the deck. And all these numbers, and the immense effort the consultants put in, and the way they have convincing answers for everything. At the time, it looked like a cool bet and could have paid off well if it had worked out. Earnings were through the roof for over a year too, so it did pad the treasury.

Can't go against fate, right? Oh well, there's still 14 board seats left. And the acquisition is better than nothing, looks like a good price. Even if your hunch is right, what's the point of punishing a team that's halfway out of the door anyway for a set of bad decisions that can't be reversed? Once you reach that conclusion, you switch off, let the German drone on in his thick accent, and think about what you'll get your granddaughter for her 5th birthday next week in Milwaukee - what is a good German souvenir that a 5 year old would enjoy? You're lost on the meeting from now on.

As for bad management, well, is it their fault? Was it part of their "schooling"? (There's a saying in trading that losses are "tuition fees") Were there extenuating circumstances? I can name (but won't, because I'm a nobody and you never know when you might need connections) a series of well known political and business figures in California, for example, who have provably run large companies to the ground (as far as my humble, not-very-profitable, not-that-learned opinion is concerned) and now enjoy exceptional careers - it's amazing how far being born in the right place and with the right network can carry you.

Since one is allowed to criticize one's own politicians, look at Sarkozy, who was voted out and replaced by what is probably the least attractive, least popular, least "presidential" candidate the left ever put up, as a protest vote more than anything, who somehow still clings to the leadership and has even managed to make himself favorite for 2017 on the right (he even had the balls to rename his party after the US Republicans). No-one, in his own party or its membership, has the balls to pull the trigger. People don't rock the boat. They make excuses, and things just decay slowly. Accountability is hard work and without help, usually leads to the loudmouth getting shot down.

I remember someone once saying that one misgiving of youth is to think you have to be exceptional when really, just doing the job properly is often enough to make you exceptional compared to your peers. I do think that business performance is naturally high-dimensional with very sparse data (high-p, low-n, with non-linear behaviour) which makes it very difficult to understand, more than people expect. For example, a LOT of companies are just levered beta - they go up faster than the market, and go down faster than the market - which makes whoever is in charge look like a genius during any extended boom, and remain a genius if he retires before the bust (putting the blame on the new guy, naturally; I'm not at all thinking about a certain company with a blue logo and two initials, or a certain "American" insurance company with three). Experienced business people are at least instinctively aware of this and avoid making too harsh judgement calls based on simplistic evidence.

Of course all I've said applies to my own conclusions. Maybe my team members and I were overworked and slightly paranoid or annoyed and saw what we wanted to see. But I'd say the probability on that one is pretty high on the side of "management screw up".