Does that not suggest that CEOs are worth their cost to the vast majority of companies that retain them? What companies operate without a de facto CEO?
Well, CEOs may be inherited from non-optimal initial conditions of early ancestors and simply haven't been replaced by a better competitor yet. Or they have been and we don't understand that yet. Naturally occurring genomes encode for processes that result in all sorts of things that don't actually have to occur. The appendix, the frenulum, most of the DNA itself, as far as we can tell. Nature's full of random dead-ends that keep propagating because the system hasn't gotten over the barrier of the next local minimum yet.
Chicken can run faster if it had optimized its head away. Because it can ignore limiting factors like potential obstacles in its current course. But for how long?
Actual problem solving in a corporation is done by humans. Corporation policy can provide a set of incentives to align goals of its employees with the goal of the corporation and a structure to more or less effectively combine specialists' efforts. But someone had to think about the corporation as a whole and change its policies if the need arises.
Cephalization is a known evolutionary trend after all.