Should be easy to test this. Let’s say that CEOs have nothing to do with a companies success (without luck of course, since so many think that luck is the primary driving factor), or at least that workers are the primary drivers for success. We can look at countries that basically have the state pick the CEOs and compare and contrast them to countries that don’t and see the results. After all, the workers in, oh, say Communist China or the Soviet Union should be on par with workers in western countries, right? So, are state run Chinese or old Soviet era companies run by the state as successful as their western counterparts? Are they as innovative? Or, to do a comparison within a country, are state run Chinese companies as successful as those nominally run by at least quasi-capitalist CEOs that weren’t simply appointed to their positions by the state? Which companies are more successful? Which are more innovative?
IMO you need to look at each case to see what the CEO is doing.
In a business where the company is a pioneering company, going where no company has gone before (or even making a success where all previous efforts have failed) then you need to give most of the credit to the CEO for having the vision to create this new reality. The employees would probably be competent, but not necessarily any more competent than any other random employees at another firm, and their special value in this case is primarily because the visionary CEO used them in ways that maximized their value. This would apply to Elon Musk’s companies, and similar.
[On a related note, many years ago I once heard Howard Stern ranting about the members of his Wack Pack gang, who he felt were getting above themselves. He felt that these people were not really talented at all, and that he was himself the only real talent involved - that he had come up with a way to use the otherwise banal oddities and quirks of these people in an entertaining way. I’m not all that familiar with the Stern show and can’t vouch for that, but it seemed plausible and was an intriguing thought in any event. The would apply to companies. You can have two identically talented and motivated engineers, programmers etc. and, based on them being given different things to build and design, produce vastly more or less useful outputs.]
By contrast, there are also mature industries, where give or take a little innovation here and there everyone is pretty much doing the same thing anyway, and the job of the CEO is really mostly to not mess things up. In such situations, the CEO is due very little of the credit, and the fact that they’re paid like they’re due most of it is one of the great iniquities of modern society.
This is especially so with CEOs of companies whose stock price rises due to factors beyond their control - business/economic cycles, commodity prices, etc. etc. - and are credited with the rise and rewarded accordingly.
Both of Musk’s company’s were also largely saved by the government, too.
SpaceX was nearly bankrupt in 2008 and had a series of failed rocket launches. Due to the financial crisis and having already tapped loans, the company had no real available money left and couldn’t tap creditors. Musk personally had money, but not enough to bail out both Tesla and SpaceX, so he was in a tough spot where he was likely going to have to let one of the companies fail so the other could survive. Instead, NASA announced a multi-billion dollar launch contract with SpaceX, essentially pulling it out of the grave. The timing and effect were deliberate–NASA’s administration and Congress have been pushing for NASA to be a growth agent for private space companies, and they saw SpaceX was a promising company in that area that was about to fail, so they stepped in.
Tesla which was also hemorrhaging money at this time but generating almost no cash, Tesla had been running for awhile by 2008 but only got the first Roadster (at very small production volume) on the road that year. Tesla famously was saved by a government loan, that it also famously and flamboyantly paid off early–but it wasn’t a CEO’s ingenuity that saved either Tesla or SpaceX, it was the U.S. Government.
Bzzzt. Try again.
Bad decisions at that level can absolutely make or break a company above and beyond “keeping things running and not muck it all up”. Kodak was a perfect example. They literally INVENTED the digital camera, but their CEOs were too hung up on the film photography business to really move into digital in any meaningful way until well after they’d lost any and all advantages they might have had. They literally viewed the advent of digital imaging as a THREAT to their core business (film cameras, film sales and film processing) that they had to fight, rather than an opportunity for the company to move into. So they kept trying to reinforce their core businesses and beat digital, when they should have moved earlier and in greater force into the digital photography business, so that they could have taken advantage of their huge name and market presence before their competitors could shut them out. But they didn’t, and instead doubled down on film.
In that case, the CEO decisions totally doomed the company regardless of the competence of the underlings, or lack thereof.
I think that the best way of determining how important someone is to the success of a company is how their performance is measured and rewarded. At small companies, the CEO is generally highly invested in the company and his success/failure is directly tied to the company’s growth, income, or some similar metric. At larger companies, the CEO shows up, gets paid a lot of money that’s not really tied to doing anything in particular, and if the board of directors decides to get rid of him gets paid another huge sack of money regardless of what he did and how well he did it, unless he did something hugely blatantly illegal and got caught. Although it’s obviously impossible to do, I’d love to see someone take 100 large companies and put a ‘qualified’ CEO in charge of 50, then drop a reasonably competent person (but no business degree or ‘c-level’ experience) into the CEO position at the other 50, and compare results. I really doubt you’d find a lot of difference in the two pools.
Easy…take 50 state run companies in China where the state has appointed CEOs and compare them to 50 Chinese companies that don’t have state appointed CEOs. Same workers, same government, same political environment. Which do better? I think that if you look into it you’ll find there is quite a lot of difference in the two pools. 
I think this misses the point.
At larger companies too, the CEO pay is generally tied to these same metrics - growth, income etc. The problem is that growth and income etc. are themselves not necessarily the result of anything the CEO did (which is the question in the OP of this thread).
The second part of your post seems to acknowledge that.
I don’t think the only difference between state-run companies and non-state-run companies is the CEO, by any stretch.
I don’t understand why you say you’re disagreeing with Sage Rat when your example supports exactly what he said. Kodak’s CEOs did something stupid and counter productive (treated digital as a threat instead of an opportunity) and so damaged the company pretty badly, just like Sage Rat said they can do. Had they simply sat back and not interfered with all of the people that wanted to exploit the digital market, the company would have been in great shape. And I don’t see what (other than minor tweaks) they could have done beyond ‘let those guys do their thing and rake in the cash’.
I was talking about US and Europe, China’s economy is radically different and I don’t know enough about it to really comment on it. I doubt that the only difference between State run companies and non-State run is the CEO, however.
Probably not, but it’s certainly one differentiator. The only hard evidence I see we can compare to, however, is either companies within China or other countries where you still have state appointed CEOs to compare to companies in the same country where you don’t, or compare western companies in general to countries that appoint their CEOs. After all, the workers should be roughly compatible, so if it’s workers then we should see some state run companies with appointed CEOs as successful as any other company (since luck is such a factor it has to smile on at least one state run and state appointed CEO company sometime, somewhere).
How are you comparing companies in the US and Europe (presumably western Europe) then? You could similar compare companies in western Europe that had or have state appointed CEOs and contrast them to companies in the same countries where the CEOs aren’t appointed by the state.
Otherwise everyone is just speculating…and many who are speculating don’t actually understand how companies actually work or what CEOs do or don’t do. But if you posit that you could just arbitrarily appoint CEOs and they will do as good as CEOs hired for the position by their boards this seems to be a metric you could use to show at least some data towards your hypothesis.
You can say that about pretty much any job. I’m pretty sure that in running a large, complex organization, it’s really really easy to “suck” at it.
I’m looking at what CEOs actually do, the sky-high amounts they get paid that isn’t significantly tied to performance, the fact credit/blame for doing good/bad is handed out arbitrarily, the lack of worthwhile performance metrics (stock price is a horrible metric), and a host of other factors. The existence of golden parachutes pretty much disproves the notion that CEO pay is actually tied to performance for me. And CEOs still get paid when they manage to run the company into the ground to the point that they need large-scale bailouts or bankruptcy filings, and often get accolades even when the company is a disaster.
State run companies are extremely different from private companies, I’ve said this before and I’m done saying it.
I’ve worked in companies and seen how CEO decisions affect day to day business, I have a pretty good idea of what they actually do. I’ve also read interviews with CEOs about what they do. And I’ve had people try to convince me that CEOs are worth their absurd salaries by telling me about what they do.
I don’t have access to the billions of dollars neccessary to run the experiment, but that doesn’t magically mean that CEOs are what the mythology says they are.
I guess it depends on which side of that fence you’re sitting on- whether they were passively stupid or actively stupid. I’m on the side that says that they were actively and willfully stupid and short-sighted, which is a different kettle of fish than being merely caretakers who just kept the same course.
It’s the difference between a ship’s captain that merely keeps the same course, and doesn’t notice the rocks under their lee, vs. a captain who actively does dumb and counterproductive things more likely to put them on those rocks. The Kodak guys actively doubled down on film with Advantix and other stupidities- they literally drove the ship onto the rocks of digital photography, as opposed to merely letting it coast up there eventually.
Or, if you prefer, merely being a caretaker and “not mucking things up” was still a strategy for massive failure, although maybe not as fast as what happened. They needed active and energetic CEOs who would have shifted the company 90 degrees from their core historical business into the digital world, and they didn’t get that.
Any competent CEO can run a company that sells the “it” product.
A good CEO can run a company when there are indications their “it” product is no longer “it”
A great CEO can predict what tomorrow’s “it” product will be and steers the company to make sure it gets there first.
If my executive assistant feels like they are so indispensable that they deserve executive level compensation we’re going to test the theory. Mary Beth Brown lost that bet. That seems standard in business - hardly sociopathic.
The sociopathic part is that by firing her instead of letting her quit, he cost the company money because their unemployment costs will go up. 
Anyway, addressing the bigger question of the post: I think a CEO is a multiplier. He can only multiply what’s already there (the other employees), but because one CEO can be a multiplier for 100,000 employees, the value placed on that individual position is much higher. The CEO who gets 2% extra is worth a lot more than the CEO who only gets 1% more.
That said, 2% more of nothing is still nothing. You need it all to work successfully.
True, but sea-change transformations like that over a short period of time are rare. More on this below. It’s very rare that one day everybody and his dog is buying your product and you have a lock on the market, and the next day nobody is buying it at all, and those two days are separated by a short span of time. In most cases, as the previous poster asserts, an established company with well established markets can just keep bumbling along with very little skill or even rampant incompetence at the top. Banks and financial institutions and regulated telecom companies are prime examples. Which is a good thing, because most CEOs are in fact incompetent. Many of the aforementioned types of companies are actually great examples of success where both the top management AND most of the employees are all uniformly incompetent!
Latching on to the next “it” product, as Kodak could have done with digital photography but didn’t, may be every CEO’s dream but in real life most business decisions are more mundane. Competent CEOs in the real world understand that the key to growing the business is not so much waiting for the next magical product as it is to engage in carefully managed expansion into promising adjacent markets that in most cases already exist. It’s what Nike did when they moved from running shoes to sports apparel to golf equipment and eventually to digital apps and devices. It’s what Apple did spectacularly when they moved from computers to music players and mobile devices and became a major force in the music business itself. Netflix is now not just a major streaming provider but also a movie production company; if they had not recognized the business they were really in, they’d be in the same boat as Blockbuster, trying to flog DVDs that nobody wants.
But it’s a path fraught with peril and requires a rigorously disciplined methodology to do well – the kind that can actually be documented and objectively assessed and systematically executed. And if not done well it’ll not just be an expensive failure but may doom the whole company by undermining its existing core business. The all-important question that a good CEO is able to answer correctly is “what business are we really in?”. Kodak mistakenly thought they were in the film business whereas they were actually in the photography business.
A great example of incompetent narrow-minded thinking and tremendous success in spite of it all is Exxon Mobil. Though the former neanderthal CEO Lee Raymond got packed off with a $450 retirement package after stupidly selling off the company’s diversified energy interests and ruining the company’s reputation by spearheading their climate change denial initiatives, I don’t think it’s gotten much better. They believe oil is their “core competency” and they are from top to bottom an oil company, not an energy company. There was a hilarious ad on their website some time ago claiming something along the lines that they were a forward-thinking company that was a major participant in the growing clean energy industry. If you dug a little deeper, it turned out what that meant was that they made the oil that was used to lubricate wind turbines. And I really didn’t make that up.
Actually Lee Raymond got more than $450. The second sentence in that last paragraph should read “Though the former neanderthal CEO Lee Raymond got packed off with a $450 million retirement package …”. 