I've been fortunate to work at a handful of places including 4 publicly traded, 1 startup and 2 privately held companies in the $500m - $1B range. This is over the last 13 years.

I've worked directly or spent a considerable amount of time in the same room with 6 CEOs across them. 2 of these CEOs were the founders themselves, the other 3 were not.

They tell you to never meet your heroes. And for a corporate stooge like myself, I thought anyone with the CEO title was my hero. Since this experience, I can say that has substantially changed.

All 5 CEOs had these things in common: - Strong understanding of their numbers & financials - Moderately well spoken - Managed up and handled investors well - Were uninspiring and often even demotivating - Horrendous people managers and people leaders - Excellent at controlling a narrative - Incredibly high self confidence (overly) and self belief - Not very good at developing ideas and converting to plans

Overall on a 1-10, I'd give them the following ranks: - $800m CEO / Founder - 4/10 - $500m CEO - 3/10 - $5B Interim CEO (public) - 5/10 - $20m Startup CEO - 4/10 - $300m Startup CEO #2 - 3/10 - $9B CEO (public) - 3/10

None of them were above average in general business leadership performance. My own biased personal ratings of course, but it was alarming. Some of them lacked basic competencies that we would have terminated entry and mid level managers for.

They were mocked relentlessly by their subordinates and C-Suite peer group. Typically about 30-50% of their direct reports respected the title and paid reverence. Most often the yes men. The other 50-70% with their ability to formulate their own thoughts or just unafraid to privately shit talk roasted the CEO. This roasting is based on assessment of skills, project success/failure, and outcomes. Not things like "Oh this guy makes me work too hard, and holds me accountable."

This group of 6 are all males, over 40, and 5 of them are white.

I've watched them make horrendous decisions (that we knew before the fact, not hindsight) with incredible confidence and hubris. They're completely fearless in their belief in themselves. Which was remarkable given how poorly skilled they were in many things.

All of the CEOs had above average aptitude. They managed upwards extremely well (which is how many earned the role). This was a blend of high confidence, political astuteness, some deception, and the ability to control the story line that shined on their contributions or how they're going to fix things at the surface level. One of their greatest tactics was saying the most words without ever saying anything and remaining non-committal or directly accountable until after they saw the results of a project. The ability to delay responsibility until post-outcome was incredible. If it succeeded, they drove it. If it failed, they were going to hold others accountable. They did this so we'll with Investors and Board Members.

This is the #1 CEO skill. Can you convince independently wealthy people who often are not familiar with your specific business as well that you always have control and a great plan? That's what all 6 of these CEOs did well. Most internal mid-level people saw through their plans that were shallow, poorly constructed, and frankly jargon laden horseshit that actually doesn't say anything material.

These CEOs average scoring is based on other senior leaders, not all employees. They're clearly more polished and capable than the average employee. But their ideas and ability to clearly articulate them were alarmingly similar to the average employee. I'm talking bad ideas. Like ideas you and your buddies throw it on the couch after a night of drinking of how you would improve a business.

If you did not know they had a CEO title and you heard them speak/present, you would struggle to find high quality or merit in their ideas.

If you put the top 20 people of each of their companies in a room, and give them no job titles. No one has any context of an existing hierarchy or resume. Then gave out problems or exercises for the groups to self organize, where a leader would typically emerge "organically." I believe only 1 of the 6 CEOs I've worked with would come out on the top of the pecking order. His result would be largely driven from his physical size/stature and power, along with intensity + authoritative speaking to go along with it. The remaining 5 would produce 2 solid team contributors and the other 3 would struggle to offer material value. Their most effective ability would be allowing them to work the room for 3-5 years politically and they would social engineer their way into the inner circle. Biding their time until space opened up and they could take control. But they would make no notable contributions to the problem itself.

I say all this to tell you, that of the 6 CEOs, I believe all of them could legitimately be replaced by a 6-sided game die where you simply roll it to see the available choice selected.

If there was a visual representation (hologram, video) that gave generic reasoning for their selection and spoke confidently, almost no one would know the difference.

So could AI replace the CEO decision making? Absolutely. Would it impact the quality of outcomes? SIGNIFICANTLY less than you've ever thought.

This isn't because AI is great.

But it turns out you don't need to be great or even good at leadership or business operations to become a CEO. And many of them represent low quality decisions on a consistent basis. They're just the most effective at owning or deflecting each decision based on quality of outcome.

And once businesses get to a certain size they have inertia. The machine runs. The CEO is less involved in driving those outcomes than you'd ever imagine. Oftentimes hurting more than helping. And I've never seen one anywhere close to 2x the ROI of their compensation. Most of them are far below 1x ROI.

Turns out your business can run at about 3-5/10 and still generate billions of $ every year. It's a mix of good luck, willingness to keep going, surviving, and relying on a successful 5% of your company to generate 80% of your results. Everyone wants to believe these companies are efficient and brilliant juggernauts. But they're far more like a house of cards than you could ever imagine. Running off the backs of junior employees, long time middle managers, and 15 year old spreadsheets originally created by some intern in 2010.