[phantasmish]

I can tell you that everyone I’ve met whose job it has been to communicate with and guide C-suiters across many companies has regarded them as basically super-powerful young children, as far as their reasoning capacity, ability to understand things, and ability to focus. Never met more cynical people about the c-suite than the ones who spend a lot of time around lots of them, without being one of them or trying to become one of them (any time soon, anyway). Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners, and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.

A lot of very cosplay/play-pretend (and sometimes expensive!) tactics I’ve seen in high level enterprise sales made a lot more sense after being exposed to these views. Lots of money spent on entire rooms that are basically playsets for high level execs to feel cool and serve no other purpose. Entire software projects executed for that purpose. I didn’t get it until those folks clued me in.

[makeitdouble]

There's exceptions to this. Usuallly founders who've made it past many mergers and kept a central role in the company. Insulting their intelligence will bite you back very quick.

But otherwise I think it's spot on. Especially for Cxx specialized in keeping the ball running, they'll have no interest in understanding most of the business in the first place, they seem themselves as fixers who just need to say yay or nay based on their gut feelings.

[mschuster91]

> Like they truly talk about them like they’re kindergarteners

Well, a bunch of them are. From what one can hear about Elon Musk for example, at each of his companies there is an "Elon handler" team making sure that his bullshit doesn't endanger the mission and stuff keeps running [1], Steve Jobs was particularly infamous among employees [2] and family [3], Bill Gates has a host of allegations [4] even before getting into the Epstein allegations [5], and Trump... well, I don't think the infamous toddler blimp is too far off of reality.

> and insist that if you want to reach them and be understood you have to do the same.

That makes sense even for those who aren't emotional toddlers. At large companies it is simply impossible for any human to dive deep into technical details, so decisions have to be thoroughly researched and dumbed down - and it's the same in the military. The fact that people are allowed to hold positions across multiple companies makes this even worse - how is a board of directors supposed to protect the interests of the shareholders when each board member has ten, twenty or more other companies to "control"?

IMHO, companies should simply be broken up when they get too large. Corporate inertia, "too big to fail", impossibility to compete against virtually infinite cash coffers and lawyers - too large companies are a fundamental threat against our societies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012719

[2] https://qz.com/984174/silicon-valley-has-idolized-steve-jobs...

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daught...

[4] https://www.amglaw.com/blog/2021/07/both-microsoft-and-its-f...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...