True, but that's partly because power is excessively concentrated in executive officers and as a group of people they are (imho) excessively invested in leadership rhetoric that leads them to develop misconceptions about their contribution to the firm's success. Not wholly unlike ships' captains, when they're doing their job job well they're mostly just keeping an eye on things and while the execution is delegated across the organization. When they mess up it's catastrophic.
This is not to say I don't think CEOs do any work. They may make major contributions in terms of developing strategic plans, communicating them to staff and inspiring them to carry them out well, negotiating with allies, outmaneuvering competitors, and balancing the conflicting imperatives of operations, finance, security, legal and so on. But they're not compensated for labor so much as given (via negotiation) a commission on profits, revenue, stock price movement or suchlike. Inevitably there are conflicts of interest with shareholders, staff, and customers, and as a class CEOs and other high level executives seem to have tilted the tables more and more in their favor over recent decades.
