This is based on a survey of Management Consultants. For those who have not worked with Management Consultants, or seen the Showtime series "House of Lies", these are not the guys you want to be your CEO. (The TV show is fictionalized, of course, but it's based on a book written by a management consultant.)

Their characteristics are rapaciousness, self focus, political and emotional manipulation and greed. They do well for themselves, not so well for the company.

So, I question the premise of this article from the beginning as its source material is not successful CEOs who spent more than 10 years at the company in question or in the CEO role.

Edit: I see I'm being buried. To be fair, there's a difference between a "management consultant" and an consulting engineer. consulting engineers get stuff done. Management consultants can also come up with great ideas (as shown in the show I referenced above) and can legitimately add value. But they are best as consultants, not employees and not CEOs. Of course generalizations are false if applied strictly- there are exceptions.

I just think that a better survey of successful CEOs would be necessary to draw any serious conclusions.

AND - more specifically- having worked with management consultants and a variety of CEOs of startups who didn't have startup backgrounds, for a startup you generally don't want a management consultant as your founding CEO.