I noticed too many situations in which members of top management
happily issued an executive fiat even though they were the least
qualified to make a decision. I'm not saying that they were stupid,
mind you.
(...)
But they had hired even smarter people to work for them: people with
advanced degrees, raw intellectual firepower, and years of
experience. And these people would work on a problem for a long time,
come up with a pretty good solution, and then watch in surprise as
their bosses overruled them. Executives who did not have specific
technical knowledge and who had not studied a problem in depth would
swoop down and issue some random, uninformed decree, and it would be
implemented – often with farcical results.