That's the traditional way of thinking and it might work well for traditional companies - but something as disruptive as this - I would vote for the visionary/thinker any day over the dyed in the wool, set in his ways guy.

Jobs/Sculley and later Tim Cook situation comes to mind - Sculley had the whole CEO experience but look how that turned out and look at how Tim Cook took over operations part which Jobs had no interest or knowledge of and made it work so well. If they had Tim Cook as the CEO pre-iphone days - I am not sure if we would have seen the iPhone.

Great comparison, but other than articles what kind of products or scalable accomplishments has Atul Gawande achieved in healthcare that is comparable to the impact of the iPhone?

This is getting tiring but the point is Atul can be the idea guy, the overall philosophy guy and they can hire other people who have product or scalable accomplishments to execute on the ideas. I think you're not giving Atul enough credit for what he brings to the being the idea guy and having first hand knowledge of what those ideas are about, being able to articulate those etc. He was also a WHO director who ran a successful project reducing surgical deaths around the world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande

That, precisely, should be the COO’s job description. Like, almost literally.

Consider the alternative: the CEO is a professional “manager” who can run the shop, but may (or more likely, may not) understand what the shop is all about. Then who drives vision and strategy? Someone lower in the hierarchy can’t get himself taken seriously enough (sorry, but that’s just the nature of hierarchies). He (Atul) could be made the exec president or something of that sort, but an organization like this one needs a more hands-on visionary, who can corral the staff, while leaving the administrative and political minutiae to a trusted lieutenant.