alt Hacker News> But ultimately if you're dealing with an opaque system, which most companies are,
While most companies have elements that are hard to see clearly [1], I would hope 95% of what the company is doing would be transparent to the CEO.
The CEO should easily be able to tell which divisions/projects are profitable, which are on track to hit their goals, how those goals combine into a coherent strategy, which areas are getting the most complaints and refunds, and so on.
[1] intangible concepts like 'innovation' and 'culture' for example
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Sadly at many companies that's really not true. The CEO has direct visibility into direct reports and those metrics, but those don't necessarily clearly indicate what changes to the system would do. Largely because they're descriptive, not predictive, in my limited experience. They also tend to be lagging or current indicators, so they tell you what policy was doing last quarter. If those metrics are trending badly, you can't just demand "move X number up" and expect any success.
You can never understand complex adaptive systems to anywhere near 95%, and leaders believing that they can—that the map is the territory—leads to some pretty bad dynamics.