[exelius]

Nobody is going to get hired as CEO of an $80 billion a year company with just an MBA. It would be an MBA plus 20-30 years of business experience, and these days it's almost impossible to avoid technology completely. I'm not even sure domain knowledge is important for a CEO of a company that size: once you become a $50 billion plus company, you don't have time to get involved with the details of the business.

[VladRussian2]

>I'm not even sure domain knowledge is important for a CEO of a company that size: once you become a $50 billion plus company, you don't have time to get involved with the details of the business.

Steve Jobs and CEOs in-between kind of make a counter-example.

[deletes]

Read the biographies of Steve and Steve; Jobs was not an expert, but was familiar with technology of that era. His father taught him electronics, and Jobs was working at Atari as an technician.

[wisty]

So what does a CEO do?

They have to make capital allocation decisions, based on the direction the market is taking. An MBA might be able to tell whether China or India needs more marketing dollars, but they won't know whether it's better to invest billions into different R&D efforts.

The executive in charge of mobile isn't going to tell the CEO "look, Windows phone is busted, just fire us and put everything behind a major effort to sell small-medium businesses turnkey enterprise systems."