I disagree (not a CEO). What’s the median worker at a company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO of those couldn’t improve (or degrade) the company’s performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or Amazon worker seems strange to me. They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
A mix of bad CEOs at those companies and good CEOs at Target, Walmart, and Amazon. I don't believe the median worker held any blame at those companies.
From that, I’d conclude that CEO capability and effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one is worth it.
That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as the guy at the front of a marching band does on the music, with other factors making the difference.
Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.
> They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
Guess who turned Sears and J.C. Penny into what they are today?