MJP - Some certainty at last, page-18

Its always easy to sound off that "the boss is incompetent". Sometimes the boss is incompetent, quite true, but often enough the boss is the more competent player in the play. Competence is a relative quality, not a digital one, i.e. people are not either totally competent or totally incompetent. Nobody makes the "right" decision every time, all of the time. Getting things right 60% of the time is the royal route to success. Any job is easy until you have to do it yourself with others watching. So, sounding off that management is incompetent might convey the appearance that the commentator could do a whole lot better, but as that is never going to be evaluated in practice, the actual worth of their commentary will never be known. Personally I find that it is often easier to criticise and find fault than to actually do a better job oneself. Often people's criticisms may sound dramatic and get others riled up with righteous indignation, but making different decisions when faced with the same full set of facts and situations is generally much harder. For that reason I admit to being more inclined to give an incumbent management team the benefit of the doubt than to simply roast them and scoff at everything they do as if they had already been decisively proven to be incompetent.

I am not saying that I agree with everything that any given management has done, or do not have questions about why X has been done and not Y, or why Z has not happened yet. But by trusting that had I been in the drivers seat I would likely also have found the case for playing things in the same way, means I am more able to sleep nights after I have made a large investment in a company.