I’ve never run anything other than my mouth

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that “executive” and “executioner” have a root word in common. As no good deed goes unpunished, conversely, there are lucrative rewards for many antisocial acts. There’s a certain school of thought that emerges in a whole range of discussion topics, such as the question of whether one CEO is as valuable to an organization (including, increasingly, nominally nonprofit organizations) as thousands of front line workers, or the question of whether the role played by venture capitalists is actually useful to society, or especially, the bringing in of executive types dubbed “emergency managers” and the like, charged with privatizing, de-unionizing, de-pensionizing, two-tiering, or otherwise humbling the economic expectations and breaking the sense of self-worth of people involved in the provision of public services. “Someone has to make the difficult/unpopular decisions,” say the Very Serious People, as if unpopularity (more precisely, antipopulism) is the very definition of leadership.