"No one ever declaims personal responsibility for a hole-in-one." That's been my mantra when dealing with senior executives over decades of corporate consulting.  The major problem is getting senior managers and executives to consider alternatives has always been getting them to challenge their beliefs.  There is a core belief in most senior people that they've achieved their position through superior skill, knowledge and personal excellence (very few attribute it to luck, or politics, or other external influences, in my experience). My own experience is that the first step is do whatever's necessary to keep the dialogue going, just so I have the opportunity to be there at the moment when they express some dissatisfaction, some concern, some doubt.  It's often necessary to engage in time-wasting projects that will not yield the results the executive wants, just to keep that dialogue going.  By carefully shaping their expectations, but meeting their needs to have "someone do something," I find that I can often gain enough of their trust to make more impactful contributions. On the other hand, I have a practice of terminating engagements with non-performaing clients.  I want to work where my contributions can make a difference.  If it's clear that it's more important to them to appear perfect and unchanging that to get better results, I prefer to move on to a more tractable and receptive environment.  I'm not a therapist, I'm a specialized consultant to businesses. It's also why my best work tends to be done BELOW the vice presidential level in Fortune 1000 firms; those people seem more open to change, more willing to consider alternatives, more willing to be intellectually honest.  Or, perhaps, I'm just tapping into the new paradigms of management (e.g., collaboration rather than command-and-control) and waiting for the older generation to (metaphorically) die (see Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions). --Friday