[mbrumlow]

Seems like CEOs could be replaced with a spread sheet. As far as I can tell most CEOs basically follow a spread sheet provided by the PE that owns the company. So I never knew why PE would ever seek to fire the 30k a year office manager, when they could fire the 7 figure CEO and half his management team -- if meetings need to be had, we can still have meetings rooms and all the spread sheets can show them self on the projectors -- automated and all.

[notme77]

The CEO is the CEO because he makes profitable decisions. You have to replace her with someone / something that makes at least equally good decisions.

[hakfoo]

From that perspective, the big question is if their decisions statistically more profitable than cheaper alternatives.

There are some companies on a very predictable path. You could replace Eddie Lampert or Johnny Ive with a D20 mapped to management tactics and get pretty much the same outcomes at least on a short to mid term.

Plenty of competent companies have enough self-contained knowledge that you could make good decisions simply by surveying the on-the-ground employees, weighting them in some way, and generating policy that way. One would hope a widget factory with a combined 200,000 man-years of widget industry experience would know more about the widget business than a drop-in CEO that had to look up what a widget was on Wikipedia before he made his introduction speech.

I suspect the real justification for the wildly overpaid C-suite is that you need someone to be a scapegoat for Wall Street's whims.

A local and autonomous team that knows their market and is competent is not going to sack half of their own to finance a stock buyback, but a $30 million a year stuffed suit can impose it from above.

[mbrumlow]

The vast majority of decisions that make or break companies are not done by the CEO. Or any of the C level people.

Most companies are like a train. The C level guys mostly report to the board where they think the train is going to be -- which is normally wag or ferry tail.

I know I am speaking in broad terms. There are companies out there where the CEO matters, but those are few and far .