CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

EDIT: To be clear, Walmart's revenue in 2020 was 559 Billion with a B[0].

We can see on that table[1] that if we take the values listed in the "Total Revenue" row (559 Million with an M, 523 Million with an M, etc) and multiply them by 1,000 according to the directions ("All numbers in thousands") on the chart that we get a result which aligns with reality.

To be even more clear, we can take the values listed in the "Gross Profit" row, multiply by 1,000 as instructed by the directions, and see that yes Walmart's annual *gross profit* is ~130B

138,836,000 * 1,000 = 138,836,000,000

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart...

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WMT/financials/

1. What data do you use? Past data of the same company? Data of other companies? Which ones? Past best performers?

2. Actually identifying all pieces of information that are relevant for decision making is a challenge in itself, as we're not talking about internal metrics but also external events and trends. Choosing and collecting all these is a challenge in itself. Moreover, it is not a one-off action, it needs to be reevaluated regularly, i.e. you need to be actively looking for factors influencing the performance of the company. Mind you, not all of them are readily measurable.

3. Part of the work of CEO is creative, i.e. not extrapolating based on past events but looking for completely new avenues and opportunities. Building such a complex system would be extremely expensive, although I agree this challenge is very interesting.

Not to mention the fact that an extremely important job of the CEO is to deal with people, not just the data. This point alone can make a difference between a well- and badly-managed company.

Especially for a CEO, who has quite a bit of power to optimize for any measure, it's going to be very hard to craft a measure that gives the results you want and can't be gamed. The most likely outcome is something that's just a worse version of the stock price, because the stock price is just a forward-looking approximation of net income, which is what you'd mostly want to optimize for anyway (ignoring things like B corps).

I get that it's hard. I get that there are long hours. I get that it requires long-term strategic thinking. None of that helps me understand O(100M) "compensation."

I'm pretty sure that executives get paid so much because of (a) their rolodex (ie. their ability to get certain people on the phone) and (b) because the world has -- not accidentally -- become convinced that it must be so and now it is that way. And everyone believes that were it not for O(100M) CEOs companies would fail.

Lots of jobs are hard and require extremely smart, gifted people. And yet somehow only executives get huge "compensation." Someone please break it down for me Barney-style because it seems like bullshit to me.

I think it's culture and power/organizational structure that determines this. Culture is disseminated from the top down, due to the power structure. If you remove the power from the CEO, their value goes away. If you change the culture without the CEO, their value goes away. So you don't need a CEO if you can force the company to change its culture and power structure a different way.