@Kathmandu @zakalwe @gemelliz @KimberlyN @Snowshadow
The "hero" CEO is one of the biggest myths sold to the general public.
They sell the fantasy that they're irreplaceable, while sitting at the top of a hierarchical pyramid.
Say that a company has an average "span of control" ratio of 1:5, so the CEO has 5 VPs reporting, and they each have 5 senior managers reporting to them and so on. That's 30 potential replacements, and we haven't even left the C-Suit, or accounted for the potential for outside applicants.
But CEOs and other senior management end up sitting on each others boards, hire the same exec hiring consultants and artificially boost their pay packets.
The whole point of the 80 and 90% top marginal tax rate wasn't to raise money for the government, it was to flatten the disparity between owners and workers.
It's no coincidence that worker wage stagnation, and C-Suit compensation inflation started in lock step with the elimination of those punitive top brackets.