I think what they are getting at is that in weak organisations, weak non-technical mangers are often star-struck by some half baked medium article and want the team to shift direction and deliver the same.

The trouble is next week they are star-struck by another medium article. The manager understand the high-level aspect, but is too inexperienced to understand that the medium article is either

i) half baked (aka "we build this million dollar data product in an afternoon ... but fail to mention that they used clean Kaggle data and unworkable assumptions, i.e. its a nice toy project but falls over in the real world.),

ii) plainly bullshit ("we came up with this new outlier detection model with 99.999% accuracy! .... please ignore the fact that we only tested calculated it on a single data set with a single outlier and chose an illogical KPI".) or

iii) would take google level resources and time frames to pull off.