You'd have to encode it in the bylaws at the time of incorporation, and then enforce it upon pain of dissolution of the company (so that if a rogue CEO decides they want to stay after all, the rest of the world is like "But now there is no company. Have fun with your paper throne.")

It's a lot like how no ruler will ever abdicate and still remain ruler, so for millenia there was no way to remove a king short of death or coup. We got around that with the invention of the constitution and the definition of a nation-state in terms of that piece of paper, which states that the ruler is defined to have set terms and be subject to an election every so often, and if they don't you get undefined behavior.

They aren't as powerful as you think- it's not like they get a huge say in how things are run. If the board was a reorg they have the power to put the people in place to make it happen, regardless of what some random Director or VP has to say about it.

> They aren't as powerful as you think

It's pretty common for C-level executives, and CEO's in particular, to be pretty chummy with the board of directors. They're all in the same social circles.

Often the CEO of company A will be on the board of company B, and and the CEO of company B is on the board of company A, so there may even be a quid-pro-quo element.

While the CEO officially answers to the BoD, in reality there's a lot of "understandings" and "gentleman's agreements" going on. This is why under-performing CEOs seem to stick around so long.

Yeah, but that's a world of difference from "director level and above", particularly at a company like Google where there are literally hundreds of VPs and Directors (if not a couple thousand).