[ryandrake]

> CEOs have skills, and have invested heavily in training those skills (if they aren't terrible) but those skills are not skills unattainable to the normal person

This is an understatement. I'd wager that the average fresh graduate of a decent two-year MBA program has all the raw knowledge and business skills required to be the CEO of 90% of companies out there. What they do is not rocket science. The reason all of us are not CEOs is not that it's impossibly challenging or specialized, it's simply that there is only one per company and there are more people than companies. It's a small tent and not everyone can fit under it.

I've met senior executives who I considered brilliant and wise beyond belief, and I've met senior executives who I'm surprised could even tie their own shoes or back out of their driveway without running over their mailbox. There's no correlation with pay or prestige. They're all rich and beyond the point where career failure is possible, purely due to the rung of the ladder they happened to land on.