Why don't executives get the vision?

Something occurred to me today, when a friend of mine tried to sell me on the vision of his film instead of the script or the source material.

When I'm financing a movie, I turn off the part of my brain that lets me write and direct. Very early into my career as an executive, I stopped having a vision for the films I was working on.

Why is that?

On the one hand, it's a defense mechanism. When I get creatively invested in a project, I tend to have very strong ideas about it. What's more, my standards of quality can be frustratingly exact. What's good enough for general audiences isn't always good enough for me, and at other times I wind up loving something that loads of people find enormous fault in. Letting a vision for the potential of the film form in my mind will probably mean being very disappointed when I face the reality of it. Better to put my ideas to bed and try to see the movie for what it is.

On the other hand, seeing the movie for what it is makes me a better executive. What is it I need to know? Obviously, I need to know whether the movie is likely to make money. If the storytelling is sub-par in the technical sense, that's a risk factor I need to be aware of. Can the team that's being assembled deliver the movie that's being proposed? Will it go over budget?

These aren't things I need my vision for. What I need is the director's vision, or enough of it to extrapolate from. While cutting myself off from a project creatively impacts my passion for the work, it also keeps all the useless distractions and judgments at bay.

Maybe studio excutives have the same problem. Maybe they should!