You are making an assumption that those decisions generally do something nice for the company. There is an army of people whose only known accomplishment is get

You are making an assumption that those decisions generally do something nice for the company. There is an army of people whose only known accomplishment is getting in the right place at the right purely out of luck and riding a luck wave. They themselves would have contributed nothing to the that wave. Once they do that, its often assumed that all their success was their own work. To expect such people to build anything of real value is a expectations gone too wrong. While they are at the top, they socialize with their equivalent highly paid buddies. Most of them are in the same league as their's. Its basically a mutual-protection club, in which you need to take care of each other. >>level of impact is way higher than the janitor cleaning the floor in your offices. In case of people like these, if exec was swapped with janitor, it would make 0 difference. The Janitor would probably even perform better than the exec.