I think that is a really excellent observation, however it seems to neglect to take into account what the CEO's actual job entails. It doesn't help that the 'CEO' job changes as the company size and mission changes as well.

It is an interesting exercise to take a moment and write down what you envision would fill the time of a CEO at the office over the course of a month. What problems would arise? Who would ask for their time? When they were investing time what would it be toward? Etc.

Ask yourself, what does the CEO actually do? And given what they do what determines how difficult it is to do that? And finally how would you evaluate their performance relative to the requirements for the job?

The above analysis casts the CEO as the 'decider.' This defines the CEO as the person who makes the decisions that could not be made by people that report to them. I have had the opportunity to ask some CEOs how they spend their time and deciding critical questions is always part of the answer, but it is usually a very small part, typically less than 20% of their time. I have also noticed it confuses the heck out of people who are CEOs of small companies and this is a big part of their time, and their company grows and it becomes less and less of their time (or worse they continue to try to make decisions that would be better off made by their staff) and they panic because they have no idea what their job is any more.

In a wider context at a larger company, the CEOs role moves away from decisions and into choices. Which path, of all the paths available, does the company proceed along. Those choices, and navigating those choices, has an inordinate effect on the long term success of the organization.

Tom Mendoza, who was the VP of Sales at NetApp and later President, used to turn everything into a sports analogy. It was so common that people would sometimes jokingly ask "How can I explain this to Tom in terms of sports?" But the reality is that sports can have a lot in common with business at the higher levels. When you look at the performance of a football team like the San Francisco 49ers across coaches and players, it is startlingly clear that the coach has a huge impact on the overall success of the team. But unlike sports teams, which get a sort of 'natural reset' each season, companies do not.

The CEO position is perhaps the single largest point of leverage on the future success of a company. And while it is impossible to know when you hire a CEO if they will have a positive, neutral, or negative effect on the company, it is clear after a while how it is going. And having it be that important to hire a good one, ones that have a 'proven' track record are going to be able to command a much better salary than one who doesn't. Not because their decisions are more employee focused or shareholder focused, but because their decisions are the ones that are good for the success of the company as a whole.

And then how do those decisions effect the company? Well in three obvious ways; they affect the effectiveness of the company at getting things done (its productivity), they affect the number of markets in which the company can complete, or they affect the company's focus. What is worse, in the midst of all these company critical factors they are trying to balance, they will have directors and VPs working for them who are actively sabotaging other directors and VPs efforts in an attempt to 'get ahead.' It would be like playing chess where sometimes a pawn just decides on its own to capture the piece it can see to make itself look more important to the other pieces on the board with no appreciation for where those other pieces are situated or what part they are playing in the current board strategy.

The bottom line is that there is a spectrum of 'CEO' from 'CEO' of a 10 person startup (which is indistinguishable from a line manager) and 'CEO' of a 100 person, 1K person, 10k person, and 100k person companies. Each order of magnitude changes the role in many ways. The one thing they all have in common is that they can destroy the company they are in charge of if they screw up or simply aren't up to the task.