McKinsey DS here. I don't think I've ever heard such a claim about data science whatever, although I would probably believe it. I do hear such claims a lot in t

McKinsey DS here. I don't think I've ever heard such a claim about data science whatever, although I would probably believe it. I do hear such claims a lot in the context of big transformations. These claims are usually high level and based on surveys or whatever. Failing usually means leadership gave up. As far as high level awareness of project success rates, it's probably accurate enough to justify the point: companies are generally bad at doing X. This tends to be true for many different kinds of X, because business is hard. I generally don't agree that people make up destined to fail projects for selfish gains. I'm sure it happens, but that seems bottom of the barrel in terms of problems to fix. With DS specifically, leaders just don't know what to do. So they hire data scientists, and the data scientists don't know anything about the business, so they make some dashboards or whatever and nobody uses them. It's really not easy. Business is hard.