They can look, but as you go up the scale of complexity, at a certain point, only the master tradesmen will have a clue whether the work is good or not. Any hi

They can look, but as you go up the scale of complexity, at a certain point, only the master tradesmen will have a clue whether the work is good or not. Any high-skill industry has huge amounts of problems with this — rarely outright fraud, but lots of problems with "confidence men" pitching mediocre solutions to problems, and conning their way into running the full lifecycle of contracts based on this. Generally they'll deliver something, but it's usually something pretty mediocre that only kind of does the job. The further a thing is from a company's core competency (and thus, the likelihood that the executives have subject-matter expertise), the more likely this problem is. People can raise objections all they want, but there's so much "poor faith" lying done in our world, that, as a boss, it's almost impossible to tell which things are libel, and which things are a desperate attempt to warn you something's wrong. Rigorous "professional bodies" like doctor's associations help immensely. These problems are at their worst in fields where things like that don't exist (such as software).