If it makes you feel better about your negative anecdotes I've had the same general experience. I've seen a lot of Business School -> Consulting -> Executive tr

If it makes you feel better about your negative anecdotes I've had the same general experience. I've seen a lot of Business School -> Consulting -> Executive track guys come through various companies in my career and they've without exception been disasters. There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead. The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.