Why do you think that you couldn't become the CTO? Serious question. What qualities are you lacking?
Besides I was born in poverty and needed lot of efforts to be able to socialize with people born upper middle class. I can only imagine what else I need to learn to socialize within upper echelons. I can't explain it to you fully.
Thanks for asking though, I never thought through this before.
In my experience all C level executives do a very good job of seeming like they know what they are doing. That seems to be a huge part of the job. Seeming like you know what you are doing, seeming like you know what is going to happen in the future (despite that being fundamentally unknowable) and being vaguely intimidating.
Beyond that they select from the set of possible projects that could be undertaken ie create a new product, overhaul some existing system, lay off a bunch of people etc etc. Having made that selection from the options put in front of them their reputation improves if the project goes well (or at least looks like it did). Their reputation takes a hit if the project goes badly.
They may have little or nothing to do with the project execution upon which their career rides. It seems like a bizarre job in that regard. Decide on a high level course of action then wait 6+ months to see if you will be considered a genius or an idiot. During that time your involvement is limited to periodically listening to status updates while looking stern.
I may have told this anecdote before, if so here I repeat it:
There was a Friday meeting at a place I was consulting at, the C-level executives were outlining the way projects would run to the end of the year. It seemed in some ways less than optimal, they then in a rare bit of insight into their processes said 'I know this looks less than optimal but the reason why we are doing this is ---blah blah blah 3 sentences of finance technobabble'.
It was quite clear the suboptimal process had been chosen to maximize available moneys for projects due to accounting decisions and specific legal regulations. Although exactly how eluded me.
I was pretty sure that most of the people there understood as little on the matter as I did but everyone did that expression on their face to signify they did understand that people generally use with me when I describe how stemming/decompounding works and why this means we will have to take another way in structuring our data for the search engine.
But yes most of the time I would look at those people and say that they don't do anything.
(I don’t mean to be disrespectful; just wanted to implore you to not fall for the self-imposed bigotry of low expectations.)
Just look on Angellist and you could probably find yourself a CTO or role — or one that could quickly lead to one. Just be excellent at your job; learn how to influence and be confident: you know more than most!
That's it. Along with hiring the right talent which is the half of the job (and often invisible) so that the work actually gets done. High-level decisions can affect hundreds or thousands of people and many more customers, so fewer but more important decisions is the trade-off, then delegating the rest so that other workers can do what they do best.
This description seems minor but the larger the company, the harder it is to keep things on track for a long-term focused vision. Also people don't do things just because you tell them to and you'd be surprised at just how hard it is to keep people working towards a goal.