Executives are there to take the blame; that's their whole job. If a team can't do the project an executive decided they were going to do, it's the exec's fault

Executives are there to take the blame; that's their whole job. If a team can't do the project an executive decided they were going to do, it's the exec's fault for deciding that's what they should try to do. This is why executives are paid stock/bonuses (because their pay should depend on the company's performance) and it's also why execs are sometimes fired through no fault of their own. Teams are supposed to be complicit; that's why the company hired execs. If you want a company that has no hierarchy, you can always just not hire any executives. "Execs can’t plan something like this on their own" – well yeah, execs can't do anything substantial on their own. If they did, they would cease to be execs. By question, I'll assume you mean your challenge to provide examples. Well, let's start with the CVEs. How many thousands of those are caused by poor hygiene in the form of buffer overflows? Then there are the crashes that aren't security bugs, like NullPointerExceptions. Actually, the most common security issue is misconfiguration, and there are a few examples here: https://www.insightsforprofessionals.com/it/leadership/famous-business-outages https://www.insightsforprofessionals.com/it/leadership/famou.... Now, you can probably explain this away by saying any kind of organizational incompetence is a sign of poor communication. You can probably even argue with some validity that poor hygiene is also a result of poor communication, but this is why I am not really here to change minds.