// And yet so few of the executives I've worked for have had good communication skills.

This is very different than my experience (finance and FAANG) where the people I worked for were almost always excellent communicators able to line up hundreds or thousands of people to "row" in the same direction.

Another point of my own experience: I was always very technical, but iterating on my ability to communicate/lead has made me a thousand times more productive/ impactful.

It sounds like those executives had exceptional communication skills—they know who to spend their time on that will help them get the next promotion, and as an underling/individual contributor, you’re not it. And yet they’re executives, which means that someone else is really liking what they’re saying, otherwise they wouldn’t be in that position.

I have observed it to be more luck based, family connections, and so on. For example, founders whose spouses are executives at FAANG, founders whose parents are industry executives, people who are children of multi-millionaires, and so on.