[akoboldfrying]

I think it should be the other way round: In an ideal world, everyone, including doctors and executives, should expect to have to demonstrate their skills when applying for a new job.

It's just unfortunate that there isn't (TTBOMK) an easy way of measuring, in a few hours, how good an executive is at executive-ing. Which is why the field is crammed with useless pretenders who nevertheless manage to flit from job to job, soaking up fat compensation packages before their incompetence is exposed.

I'm curious why there doesn't seem to be the same market for lemons for doctors. Or is there? How does a person actually know if a doctor is good?

[throwaway2037]

    > executives, should expect to have to demonstrate their skills when applying for a new job

They do. The interview process is a review of your "wins and losses" (public and verifiable is the gold standard), plus you need to complete some case studies.

[akoboldfrying]

That's better than nothing, but not much better -- many people have an outsize ability to "dress up" any arbitrary thing as a win, and in that case what the interviewer is really testing is a mixture of (1) that person's ability to produce wins, and (2) that person's ability to dress things up as wins.

(As far as I can see, there's no obviously better way to interview executives, since in general their actual day-to-day work -- building relationships and making strategic decisions -- takes months or years to prove out, and in any case the outcomes are heavily dependent on external factors and their ability to read them.)