I think that when executives hear maxims like "don't do Agile, be Agile" they are merely confused, because most Scrum Masters are not able to speak in terms of the issues that executives face.

The Agile community has done a terrible job of speaking in terms of business issues. Scrum is not the answer for that: Scrum is a team-level process; and Scrum treats the business as a single stakeholder shoveling stories at teams. That is not a good model at all.

Executives are accountable for big things: big dollars, big outcomes, and often human safety on a large scale (run an airline?) They will have a high bar for what they expect their advisors to know and the breadth of their experience. The Scrum community, by and large, how not had messaging that is credible enough to listen to, from an executive's perspective.