No. of Recommendations: 7
There are *lots* of very smart and capable people out there. The myth of the rare genius is very much over hyped. Yes, there are a few exceptional outliers...but not many. It would be silly to start with the notion that the CEOs getting the most pay are worth the most pay, (or that the CEO ought to be the highest paid person in a firm), since skill in the CEO role is such a vanishingly small part of the process of getting to be one of them. As but one random example, if you don't found the firm yourself, you better be tall if you want to be in charge.
I had a very tall relative who was the president of a major oil company. He once mused that "you could replace all the top execs in the oil business with some good MBA's and it would continue to run just fine". Later that week he had breakfast with the CEO of IBM, after which I drove out to the Nantucket airport, where we went through a private side entrance onto the runway and he hopped on the company jet to go to Alaska for some salmon fishing. Nice job if you can get it.
