Funny enough, the author of this blog post wrote another one on exactly that topic, entitled "What do executives do, anyway?"[1]. If you read it, you'll find it's written from quite an interesting perspective, not quite "fly on the wall," but perhaps as close as you're going to get in a realistic scenario.

[1]: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926

"Surely I could do a mediocre job as a CxO by parroting whatever is hot on Linkedin"

Having worked for a pretty decent CIO of a global business I'd say his main job was to travel about speak to other senior leaders and work out what business problems they had and try and work out, at a very high level, how technology would fit into that addressing those problems.

Just parroting latest technology trends would, I suspect, get you sacked within a few weeks.

A charitable explanation for what CxOs do is that they figure out their strategic goals and then focus really hard on ways to herd cats en masse to achieve the goals in an efficient manner. Some people end up doing a great job, some do so accidentally, other just end up doing a job. Sometimes parroting some linkadink drivel is enough to keep the ship on course - usually because the winds are blowing in the right direction or the people at the oars are working well enough on their own.

I always found it weird how most management would do almost anything other than ask their dev team "hey, is there any way to make you guys more productive?"

Ive had metrics rammed down my throat, Ive had AI rammed down my throat, Scrum rammed down my throad and Ive had various other diktats rammed down my throat.

95% of which slowed us down.

The only time ive been asked is when there is a deadline and it's pretty clear we arent going to hit it and even then they're interested in quick wins like "can we bring lunch to you for a few weeks?", not systemic changes.

The fastest and most productive times have been when management just set high level goals and stopped prodding.

Im convinced that the companies which seek developer autonomy will leave the ones which seek to maximize token usage in the dust in the next tech race.