There’s talk on this thread that boards choose a CEO based on their marginal competence.
I doubt there’s much evidence this is true.
Boards select “the best person they can justify to shareholders.” Being expensive is a feature. A board member invents reasonable criteria for choosing a candidate: years of relevant industry experience at the VP level, advanced business degrees, charisma and “It” factor, recommendations from influencers, etc.
As a result, the candidate pool shrinks from “honestly, lots of people could do this job” to “we have to choose one of three candidates.”
From there, it’s all supply and demand curves, where the company has artificially crunched the supply and the price skyrockets.
The solution isn’t to automate the leader. The solution is to admit to ourselves that a highly-relational project manager with a decade at the company could lead it as well as the CEO, if not better.
The owners (or, for public companies - which most companies aren't - voting shareholders) are free to select whatever criteria they want for CEOs and appoint whomever they want.
If selecting a highly-relational project manager with a decade at the company would allow them to save a lot of money, they can try that out and potentially outcompete other companies due to slightly lower costs; and if selecting a very expensive outside CEO saves them some worry, that's a "service" they can choose to buy. If in the end the performance is the same and it's a waste of money, in the end it's their money (not, for example, the workers) to waste as they wish.
I doubt there’s much evidence this is true.
Boards select “the best person they can justify to shareholders.” Being expensive is a feature. A board member invents reasonable criteria for choosing a candidate: years of relevant industry experience at the VP level, advanced business degrees, charisma and “It” factor, recommendations from influencers, etc.
As a result, the candidate pool shrinks from “honestly, lots of people could do this job” to “we have to choose one of three candidates.”
From there, it’s all supply and demand curves, where the company has artificially crunched the supply and the price skyrockets.
The solution isn’t to automate the leader. The solution is to admit to ourselves that a highly-relational project manager with a decade at the company could lead it as well as the CEO, if not better.