Everyone is bad at changing themselves. A company is a system where the individual parts are people. Systems are built with a purpose. Changing the system means changing the purpose, often requiring exchanging old parts for new and completely revamping the system.
Creating vision for this re-design requires distance which most CEOs don't have as they are too embroiled with the day to day maintenance of the existing system, by definition.
People in technology use the machine metaphor for the human mind literally. See neural networks and even basic terms like Artificial Intelligence (there are no and have never been any intelligent machine or program). This certainly is not a strawman.
Please point me to a technologist who believes the brain to be a von Neumann architecture.
The existence of misunderstandings by lay outsiders does not, in itself, invalidate the use of the metaphor, especially as it's used within the actual research community.
He's likely is referencing the fact that back in 2012 the Chinese data was just from Shanghai. This was not a secret -- it was also listed as just being from Shanghai. And they took first or near first in literally everything. Shanghai, of course, is a city (a rather large one at a population of 24 million) but not China as a whole.
There was extensive media coverage calling China's results completely fake and unrepresentative. The most recent data from 2015 (what I referenced) tested China as a whole. Their rankings declined, yet they remain far ahead of the US in everything except reading where we are a tiny sliver ahead of them. This received minimal media coverage.
This is a general issue when media. When the media emphasizes one issue strongly, only to give minimal coverage to the revelation that they were wrong (the implication of the coverage was that China would not be a world leader if the data were 'real') - it leads to a misinformed populace.
Sounds like another instance of centralization that must be disrupted by the blockchain