You have a good point, but it's clear that CEOs do have a huge effect on company fortunes. When you get a rockstar CEO, the upside is obvious. And when you get an idiot CEO, so is the downside.
Kind of. One problem is that Wall St isn't great at distinguishing between idiot CEOs who sweat companies in the short term but kill them in the long term, M&A shopaholic and management-by-rebrand CEOs who flap around doing a lot of useless stuff with no actual clue, rock stars who grow companies with a vision, and bullshit CEOs who churn through investor cash and wishful thinking but create no real profitability.
The issue of distinguishing high-quality execs from low-quality ones is one of the points mentioned in the Jacquart & Armstrong paper that I think the article was referencing[1].
Kind of. One problem is that Wall St isn't great at distinguishing between idiot CEOs who sweat companies in the short term but kill them in the long term, M&A shopaholic and management-by-rebrand CEOs who flap around doing a lot of useless stuff with no actual clue, rock stars who grow companies with a vision, and bullshit CEOs who churn through investor cash and wishful thinking but create no real profitability.