I'm thinking of a Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Jadzia is among the lucky few among her race, the Trill, implanted with a "symbiote" carrying the memories of all of its previous hosts. Carrying a symbiote is an unrealized dream for many Trill who wash out of the rigorous application and training process and are told they're incompatible. In one episode, one such disgruntled fellow tries to steal Jadzia's. In another, we learn a twist: compatibility is actually very common. There just aren't enough symbiotes to go around, so they lie about it.
My pet theory is that grossly-paid C-suite executive jobs are like this. Plenty of middle-managers could do as well as the average CEO. But there's only so much room at the top of the hierarchy, and we need to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars.
> Plenty of middle-managers could do as well as the average CEO.
I’ve worked with several CEOs and countless senior executives, both at very large companies and small, who had varying degrees of competency. I don’t think this is generally true. Being successful at that job entails a specialized skill set that is rarely evident in middle management. What you are “managing” at the most senior levels of large organizations is very different than as a middle manager, it becomes an entirely different kind of role. The vast majority of people aren’t even able to competently run a small company or startup, never mind a large enterprise.
I think very few people are really cut out for that role. It is a case where demand exceeds supply, which drives up prices. There are many mediocre people in those roles because supply is so scarce.
I think you are right that the skills to be a successful CEO are rare, but I think the main problem is that the hiring process for CEO is so incestual that the majority of the people who would be good for the job aren't even considered. Instead the applicant pool consists of "son of current CEO", "son of CEO's favorite politician", and several "CEO that is currently failing a different company". The applicant pool feels small because they never look beyond the boundaries of "billionaire families who go to the same country club".
There are a few CEOs that seem to truly make a difference, and maybe those would be worth the money, but for the most part companies are grossly overpaying for people who are mediocre to terrible at the job and will deploy the golden parachute in a couple of years to go fail at a different company.
The CEOs that belong to the club (network) can draw on the resources available to that network. It is widely believed that this ability is more important than the technical skills. It used to be correct when e-mail, LinkedIn or Google were not a thing. Now this is simply a cargo cult.
That smells like rationalization to me. "No candidate outside of my personal circle of friends could possibly do this job because being in the circle is required to do the job."
I think that there are a lot of people that are cut out to be CEO, but most of them are already working as CEO - of a small business, or household, or one-man consultancy. There are very few people that are cut out to be CEO of the particular big corporation that is hiring for CEO. If you take the Ribbonfarm essay at face value, the quality that qualifies a person to be CEO is that their natural personality is in total alignment with the direction that the organization needs to go, and so they can merely be themselves, loudly and brashly, and they will attract followers that take the organization in that direction. There are just a handful of people, oftentimes one or none, whose natural personality is perfectly aligned with where the board wants to take the company. When you find that one, you should pay top dollar to get and retain them, because you may not find another.
and for each genuine such personality the board will find a dozen psychologically problematic implicit conman (or conperson) that seems a close enough fit. and these scammers are the very visible symptom that folks talk about usually.
Can you elaborate what those skills are in your view? Meaning no disrespect, your current comment sounds like a hand-wavy opinion with zero actual justification.
I mean, we don't need to pay them that much. These obscene salaries weren't the norm a few decades ago. They're the end result of Reaganite tax policies failing to tax super-high-earners progressively.
In fact, I see no obvious connection between the marginal tax rate and how much companies choose to set CEO's pretax compensation. Can grandparent explain?
You might think that paying a 45% marginal rate tax instead of 94% would mean you could be paid less while keeping more! How did lowering personal income tax increase compensation?
I imagine it's much easier for a CEO to justify divesting money from the company's profits to himself and to the government at a 1:1 ratio than it is at a 1:20 ratio.
I would posit that the CEO-to-government ratio acts, in a roundabout way, as a profit-to-pushback ratio. As a CEO, it may not be worth facing the board's reaction to spending two million dollars just so that you get an extra hundred thousand dollars.
CEOs have a ton of leverage and use it to use to their personal benefit. But they really are important- stock prices will change the value of a company by hundreds of millions of dollars based on a good or bad CEO joining or leaving, and it's not like the investors are all in on the scam.
There are mechanisms in the existing system to fight high CEO pay, EG activist investors will get involved with companies and occasionally force CEOs out or cut their pay.
I've never seen a CEO with any actual accountability. There's always someone else who failed and caused THEM this inconvenience.
I hear it's a hard job that's deserving all of that money. True, I don't want to talk and lie to customers all day. I just want to build things. Does the CEO want to build things? It's probably a different skill set they're not interested in. I could do it though, just like any job.
With some practice and a guiding team I can do literally anything. Even better if I don't have to worry about production bugs over the weekend. Even better if I know if I get fired tomorrow, I could retire and be set the rest of my life. Or use my golden privileged network + stamp of success to start back up whenever I want.
Not that they "do" even customer relations type of work. That's what their staff is for. They just have to be the face that reads the prompts.
I constantly see a lot of humble bragging, of course, immediately followed by pictures from ultra luxury places or a second vacation home in an extremely expensive place.
From what I see, it's just someone who has a few zoom meetings every day where they're essentially host at a party. Their team does all the actual work going into any of it. They pick the drinks and the scenery, note all the guests' allergies and even call in the catering. Host just shoes up for a little bit.
Then they take a long lunch, and come back an hour before everybody leaves for work. "Taking off already? Ha ha, I miss those days where I could do nothing all day too and then head out early. Have a good one."
Write a blog entry and then it's time to hurry off and talk to meet the interior decorator for lunch and vacation planning committee. Of course this all counts as work because the host NEEDS somewhere to entertain the guests.
When they have a bad day and have to do layoffs, for example, they can't even truly take accountability then. It's just wrapped up as an learning experience, or "the rest of the company needs this to not lose even more jobs."
Maybe they even describe how they failed, but you can just tell it's just words. They don't truly believe that in the heart. Like a child lying about being sorry.
It's probably better than the worst of them who say, "Actually, you deserve this. If only you'd worked harder." Or is that the best of them because they're finally honest? I truly believe that's the real feeling behind any humility-appearing outward-facing apology.
(Wouldn't you cut your salary before layoffs, for example, if you truly felt real sorrow? Even if it you could cut it just enough to save 1 more person. Let alone taking a humble standard salary and saving a few. The opposite of this action would be receiving a large bonus that year. Something we see and hear happening in actuality almost every time.)
My pet theory is that grossly-paid C-suite executive jobs are like this. Plenty of middle-managers could do as well as the average CEO. But there's only so much room at the top of the hierarchy, and we need to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars.