I've long called this the "Dr. John Theory of CEO's" - I was in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time. Take McDonald's for example. Their stock

I've long called this the "Dr. John Theory of CEO's" - I was in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time. Take McDonald's for example. Their stock was up a bunch yesterday on nice earnings, and everyone cheered that the new CEO's turnaround was seeing results. Yay! Except this is a global company with over 30,000 stores, and the new guy had only gotten the job in March. And magically, he gets 100% credit for the good news, even though all he can reasonably do as the CEO is tinker around (eg Egg McMuffins all day - yippee). Ditto Ruth Porat at Google, same thing. She had been on the job for all of seven weeks when Google reported great earnings, and when results were good everyone was like, "ZOMG RUTH IS INCREDIBLE!!" Or Marissa Mayer...the list is endless. It's almost comical how lazy people are at attributing success and failure to executives who simply showed up at the right time and took credit for the inevitable.