That's not necessarily true at all. Sometimes organizations simply wind up in impossible positions. Funding dries up for macroeconomic reasons that you have no

That's not necessarily true at all. Sometimes organizations simply wind up in impossible positions. Funding dries up for macroeconomic reasons that you have no control over, demand patterns change, etc. There are plenty of failed orgs that would have failed even if they'd had true business geniuses leading them. You could just as easily assert that paying someone $285K got the expertise that kept the organization going for an extra 3 years than it would have otherwise, because someone with less expertise would have made a bunch of worse choices that it would have run out of money 3 years earlier. You seem to be demanding some kind of divine level of perfection here.