If you don't mind, could you rephrase your conjecture as a falsifiable hypothesis?
A path is sequence of correlated activities that lead to a particular goal or deliverable.
A choice can increase or decrease the total number of goals or deliverables.
A decision can increase or decrease the success chances of a pre-existing goal or deliverable.
Generally a startup CEO has one deliverable, the product. And all of their actions are decisions on how to de-risk that deliverable at minimum cost.
An enterprise CEO has multiple deliverables, evalutated as 'enterprise value'. Their actions are generally choices to add or remove deliverables to increase enterprise value.
I think the distinction between choices and decisions is arbitrary.
The real difference is that startups have to keep customers and/or initial investors happy. They're also more likely - on a scale of "absolutely very much" to "I suppose I should care, I guess" - to take an interest in the employee culture.
Enterprise CEOs have to keep their boards and institutional investors happy, and mostly don't give a crap about employee culture, except in so far as it contributes to the first goal.
The problem for enterprise CEOs is that there are painful, obvious conflicts between Wall Street's persistent demand for high quarterly returns, the on-the-ground demands of keeping a business healthy and growing, and the value of their own personal stake in the company.
I certainly agree that Enterprise CEOs do have to be doing a good job in the view of the board, exactly like any employee has to do a good job in view of their supervisor if they wish to retain their job. The board can fire them. But that also raises the question of how much is the continued presence of a 'bad CEO' the Board's fault.
And I don't agree at all with this statement The problem for enterprise CEOs is that there are painful, obvious conflicts between Wall Street's persistent demand for high quarterly returns, the on-the-ground demands of keeping a business healthy and growing, and the value of their own personal stake in the company.
If the stock price is a proxy for the health of the company and the CEO is in charge of keeping the company healthy, then the stock price and the CEO are aligned. I've only really been on 1:1 speaking terms with two enterprise CEOs, Scott McNealy (Sun) and Dan Warmenhoven (NetApp). And neither of them was 'conflicted' about what Wall Street 'demanding' high quarterly returns, nor did the noise of traders on Wall Street enter into their business decisions as far as I could ascertain. When decisions were made and communicated they are very solid reasoning behind them around how the choice would improve the company. I have also seen startup CEOs that made extraordinarily bad decisions that benefited themselves personally at the expense of the company, both Zynga and Groupon showed how painful that could be. But when you look across the millions of companies, just in the US, it is hard to find a persistent, or even prevalent, pattern of CEOs who put themselves or by proxy the stock price, ahead of the company issues. I am certainly open to evidence that this is the case, I just haven't seen it.
If a small department has a great set of low-risk, high-reward projects, but runs out of budget, the company should run the project so long as the risk-adjusted reward is greater than the cost of capital. But instead, they must stick to the plan.
Being skeptical of arbitrary new definitions is a good defense against intentional conflation of two definitions. I find psychology papers are frequently guilty of using a very narrow, specific definition for a word in part of their research then switching to a very broad definition for their conclusions.
It is an interesting exercise to take a moment and write down what you envision would fill the time of a CEO at the office over the course of a month. What problems would arise? Who would ask for their time? When they were investing time what would it be toward? Etc.
Ask yourself, what does the CEO actually do? And given what they do what determines how difficult it is to do that? And finally how would you evaluate their performance relative to the requirements for the job?
The above analysis casts the CEO as the 'decider.' This defines the CEO as the person who makes the decisions that could not be made by people that report to them. I have had the opportunity to ask some CEOs how they spend their time and deciding critical questions is always part of the answer, but it is usually a very small part, typically less than 20% of their time. I have also noticed it confuses the heck out of people who are CEOs of small companies and this is a big part of their time, and their company grows and it becomes less and less of their time (or worse they continue to try to make decisions that would be better off made by their staff) and they panic because they have no idea what their job is any more.
In a wider context at a larger company, the CEOs role moves away from decisions and into choices. Which path, of all the paths available, does the company proceed along. Those choices, and navigating those choices, has an inordinate effect on the long term success of the organization.
Tom Mendoza, who was the VP of Sales at NetApp and later President, used to turn everything into a sports analogy. It was so common that people would sometimes jokingly ask "How can I explain this to Tom in terms of sports?" But the reality is that sports can have a lot in common with business at the higher levels. When you look at the performance of a football team like the San Francisco 49ers across coaches and players, it is startlingly clear that the coach has a huge impact on the overall success of the team. But unlike sports teams, which get a sort of 'natural reset' each season, companies do not.
The CEO position is perhaps the single largest point of leverage on the future success of a company. And while it is impossible to know when you hire a CEO if they will have a positive, neutral, or negative effect on the company, it is clear after a while how it is going. And having it be that important to hire a good one, ones that have a 'proven' track record are going to be able to command a much better salary than one who doesn't. Not because their decisions are more employee focused or shareholder focused, but because their decisions are the ones that are good for the success of the company as a whole.
And then how do those decisions effect the company? Well in three obvious ways; they affect the effectiveness of the company at getting things done (its productivity), they affect the number of markets in which the company can complete, or they affect the company's focus. What is worse, in the midst of all these company critical factors they are trying to balance, they will have directors and VPs working for them who are actively sabotaging other directors and VPs efforts in an attempt to 'get ahead.' It would be like playing chess where sometimes a pawn just decides on its own to capture the piece it can see to make itself look more important to the other pieces on the board with no appreciation for where those other pieces are situated or what part they are playing in the current board strategy.
The bottom line is that there is a spectrum of 'CEO' from 'CEO' of a 10 person startup (which is indistinguishable from a line manager) and 'CEO' of a 100 person, 1K person, 10k person, and 100k person companies. Each order of magnitude changes the role in many ways. The one thing they all have in common is that they can destroy the company they are in charge of if they screw up or simply aren't up to the task.