journalists and no management experience.
"how the hell do journalists really sit in their chairs and slag off CEOs when they've most likely never sat in any form of management chair in their lives"
Because being on the inside of something inevitably colours and biases your perceptions and judgements, and sometimes an outsider can see something more clearly without the weight of years of preconceived assumptions, for one. When you play a given social role for many years, you become part of an in-group; learn to talk the jargon, learn to think the way the group thinks, and basically take to heart many habits of thought and unacknowledged preconscious attitudes that colour how the world seems to you. Other possibilities become closed off in your mind; self-reinforcing feedback sets in; it doesn't occur to you to think in certain ways or ask yourself certain kinds of questions because you aren't in the habit of doing so in those ways.
From the original blog:
"Sure, lots of executives are incompetent or dysfunctional. But is a journalist qualified to make that determination?"
Well, often enough, yes; often enough, execs make such stupid and blatantly damaging decisions that *anyone* with a degree of basic common sense is qualified to make that determination. Journos may not have "done" management themselves, but they've probably *seen* quite a lot of it, since observing and reporting on the behaviour of companies is their daily lot. Their experience may be shallower but it's also a lot broader. If they've seen a lot of execs making similar bad decisions down the years, when another one does it they're entitled to speak out.
It's a commonplace, but also a fallacy, that you aren't fit to evaluate something unless you have spent years doing it yourself. Almost the other way round: only an outsider can properly evaluate something without succumbing to group-think. They'll need some study, training or other experience to give them the mental toolset they'll need to understand and evaluate the concepts and strategies involved in the activity, but they don't need to be a part of it themselves.
See also Hagbard Celine's SNAFU principle.