I mean, to be fair, no executive is managing thousands of people. Maybe leading thousands of people, but there's a real physical limit to how many people you can directly manage.

That was my first thought at "270,000+ employees across 16 brands". They're not handling those people. They're paying multiple tiers below them to deal with those people. They'd be thinking of brands as units, and staff below them think of teams within those brands as units, and so on.

I do not understand people that believe all executive are useless and do nothing.

Can you blame anyone? For decades, average workers have faced layoffs, shrinking wages, stagnant career growth and numerous other downsides. For instance, Wells Fargo has gone through multiple layoffs and downsizing over the last 2 decades, and yet their CEOs have all gotten golden parachutes, never once facing the negative affects of their own decision making. There's so many examples of this it hardly makes front page news anymore.

Between the failures of Kodak and RIM/Blackberry, and with hindsight being able to see how that falls could have been avoided, I've come to see the job in new light.

> nor the experience to manage thousands of people.

No-one is managing thousands of people.

You might have ~10 direct reports as CEO (common incident command theory says that number should be between 3 and 7, optimal around 5, because after that, you start to lose connectivity between what each report is doing).