Getting a little off subject here but the board is not necessarily as informed as it should be at times. Management can be very tricky at painting rosy pictures when it comes to performance metrics.
Here is a real life example I experienced, I wasn't the only one affected, others got screwed in the same way.
I was managing a multi-year project with a budget in the millions of dollars. We (all of the managers) had schedule (SPI) and financial (CPI) metrics to meet. The end of the year was coming and our division was behind meeting the "sales" metric and the division manager and his team were not meeting their targets for their performance bonus. For those of you unfamiliar with the metric, sales is what allows you to bill the customer for work performed. When you complete a task in your contract schedule, you submit the report along with an invoice and "book" the sale before the end of the year.
Many of us mid level managers were directed to perform some tasks we were not ready for and the results were a huge waste of resources and budget. We understood what was happening but, we knew that we would not be punished for future cost over runs to redo the tasks. I took a $100k hit to my budget without getting any benefit (I was already under running), others had similar hits. Management got their year end bonus and we kept our jobs for being team players.
Stockholders never know any of this stuff goes on.