>Literally all they do is facilitate meetings so other people can do things for them.

No, they define the process for decision making (ie: the values) and then enforce that it is followed. That includes finding those who don't follow it and either providing guidance or ultimately firing them. Of course, the people you're trying to find may be actively trying to hide.

There is a difference between not making direct business decisions and doing nothing.

Dude they don't even do this. You don't get it. They DELEGATE the decision making, the values and the enforcement as well. The firing, the finding guidance is all delegated.

It've very very minimal what they do. The overall performance of the executive is determined by his selection of right hand men. The executives main skill is managing the board and selecting the right people to do things for them.

The executive is not talented at creating, building or running a company. His main talent is selecting the people who do it for him. Also honestly, all this "value setting" stuff is trivial. Ultimately the people underneath him adapt to what works regardless of values.

I've always kinda suspected this just because so many execs seem to have time to be on multiple boards, CEO of whatever, head of some charity, advisor to some startup they have a stake in, et c., all at once, and "they work a lot" can't explain all of that.

Ever notice how management always think estimates have tons of wiggle room as if you are screwing around half the day?

That's because that is their experience in the workplace.

Caveat I should mention. Not all execs are like this, but most are, and this is all that is, in the end, required from the exec.

A contrarian example is Steve Jobs. A man who dipped his fingers into every aspect of the company.

Not true. It was just unpredictable what aspect he would go off on.

Hold on. You say not true but then you say he did dip his fingers in an unpredictable way.... Of course perhaps you meant he didn't dip his fingers into everything at the same time... Well of course he didnt... he did dip his fingers into random things and eventually over time it led to him basically touching almost every aspect of the company.

No. He went off on the color of plastic, the radius of curvature of a housing, the color of the resin in a circuit board. He had no concept of the control of electrical noise in the read head of a disk drive, but almost everything in the company was more like that than the damn plastic. He flattered himself that he controlled everything, and nobody contradicted him, but it was both delusory, and a damn nuisance when he did notice some detail to bother people over.

My phone is different from an iphone in literally millions of ways, some thousands of which Jobs could conceivably have perceived, but very, very few of them are better for his attention to them, and in many of them my phone is objectively better.

Steve Jobs built the company. Then he was ousted by an executive who only knew how to delegate.

Then Steve Jobs came roaring back and turned the entire company around.

The anecdotes you describe. I'm sure it's true. But it's not the full story.

Two paragraphs being the full story would be an anomaly.

But it matters whether they are true.

Former Apple employees disagree btw:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/12/13/how-did-steve-...

A line worker must make 1000s of decisions a year, but even if all of them are made wrong, it won't break the company.

An executive only has to make a few decisions a year, but any one of them could make or break the company.

Selecting people and value setting may seem trivial, but that's because you only see the results, and not the process. Start from a blank slate and try to select the right people and choose the right values to make a company, and see how easy it really is.

It's not easy but it's not inhumanly hard that only special people can do it.

Also believe it or not, if the executive wanted to, he could delegate those few decisions as well. The key choice is he has to find the right people to delegate to, that's it...

If the executive has any type of special skill AT ALL. All it usually is, is having the ability to get to his position. That involves navigating politics, convincing people to give him money, making the seed money himself. These are the only things that make him standout if he isn't a founder or worked any other unrelated job.

A fire safety inspector, or people in charge of infecting nuclear facilities should earn millions

The reality of the world is that people are not paid by how much they deserve but by supply and demand.

The even deeper reality is that people aren't even paid by supply and demand but they are paid on the perception of supply and demand.

(Most) executives are paid not by supply and demand but by perception.

But those people don't really make decisions, do they? It's about strictly following a set of rules, to minimize your personal liability.

The rules are not strict or clear cut, in UK we recently had a skyscraper burn down (grenfell tower). The residents complained that it was a fire hazard for years. The court case is going on for the second year, and it's still unclear if regulations were broken, or regulations themselves are broken.

But even if we adopt your point of view, is the civil defining rules for safety of nuclear powerplants paid even 1% of the damage Fukushima has caused?