This may seem slightly pessimistic, but I'd guess that C-suite folks have enough connection with the goals, vision and details of the business to feel like they

This may seem slightly pessimistic, but I'd guess that C-suite folks have enough connection with the goals, vision and details of the business to feel like they are connected to day-to-day events -- including an ability to speak about them confidently -- and perhaps even get involved with daily activities from time to time, although their (operational) value-add is completely and perhaps necessarily completely disconnected from the transactional business fundamentals. What we have going on here, I think, is a set of businesses which typically have (at minimum) two tiers - the "network tier" where your value is your personal connections, education, wealth and power: highly leveragable into success of a single or multiple businesses that you sit with, and the "production tier" - people who actually do the f'ing work of turning the network tier's demands into something that resembles it in reality. Businesses that don't have both aren't likely to thrive. Resulting questions: what are the true directional dependencies between those two groups, and how do they each sustain them? Could that be made healthier for all participants? I have no doubt that this has probably already been explored by economic philosophers in other, more precise terms: this is just my naive attempt to put the patterns into my own words.