A comparison would be to fund managers and how the rise of index funds showed they actually added very little value in many cases, and weren't worth their fees.
From the study: “Interestingly, similar deaths experienced by individual members of the board of directors do not significantly affect firms’ outcomes. Our results provide strong empirical support for the idea that CEOs are extremely important to firm performance.”
So I’d say they add significant value.
https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/mygsb/faculty/research/pubfile...
Something tells me AI isn't quite there yet to run multi-billion dollar firms and won't be for a while.
You don't know any companies without CEO's? Exactly!
They have 3 people (the co-founders) sharing the role/responsibilities of CEO.
So 3 founders are running the company, nothing special about that.
Please show me a company without a CEO.
The strange reasoning is taking the the statement that said "just one driver could be a liability" and asking for vehicles with no drivers.
The only thing that you didn't consider is in CEO or management world, most keyboards are broken, and only a few work decent enough to do proper programming. That's why they are so valuable.
This probably shows some perverse incentives. A CEO can clearly prove their worth by otherwise sabotaging the firm when they're out.
It's an interesting data point but the conclusion seems overbroad. One might equally draw on this conclusion to say that families of regular people probably need proportional levels of economic support following the death of a family member.
Here's how it works:
1) Money is invested in companies by a diffuse set of investors. That diffuse group is unified and the decisions are made by people responsible for managing money.
2) They invest it with the intention of having it go into the productive activities of a business, such as staff and plant and equipment or technology or software or marketing. That money when received by the business is managed by the company management led by the CEO.
3) What actually happens is that each of these gatekeepers is taking as much as they can get away with. It really isn't all that much more complicated than that.
Everyone involved will concoct increasingly complex rationalizations and call it "performance" and launch decades of public relations campaigns and fund business schools and business publications to rationalize and create a sheen of reasonableness about why this is all the natural order of things.
But, at the end of the day what is happening is that the people who are responsible for distributing resources to a common enterprise are taking more and more of it and keeping it.
Because they want to, and because the system lets them.
I bet you think business is a zero sum game.
I bet you think the economy is the same as "a business".
I feel there are ways to be more targeted in calculating contributions. I also feel the hiring process for CEO and executives are inefficient.
It's almost impossible to know if you've found the next Bob Iger, Nadella or a John Sculley when you hire them. Of course with hindsight you can point to certain things but it's hard in the moment.
And for the most part boards pay people based on their belief that they've found the next Iger, not pay them like s/he could nearly destroy the company like Sculley almost did with Apple.