A management accounting guy is great at hedging financial risks, but that is what they'll always focus on, not the real world. What we are seeing with Boeing now is what happens if leadership is adrift without a good intuition about real world physical risks and what it takes to address them. You can't maximize profits while regularly causing catastrophic events.
If the CEO has no clue what the company does, those people could be blowing smoke up his/her ass
There has to be assurance of technical competency somewhere, and someone that has ultimate authority to get rid of the incompetent.
This doesn't disagree with your second sentence. The pursuit of profit seems to turn everything into a bank or gacha machine. Both safety and competency fall by the wayside.
He has to trust his CTO (whatever that title is at boeing for their top engineer manager) to be the judge of that. The incentives have to align wrt quality engineering for there to be trust all the way down to the junior most engineer.
He should probably know enough to sense if the people who report to him are talking nonsense or not, and to properly weigh what they say.
I mean, what's going to happen if two technical leaders have a disagreement, and all he knows is how to count beans? How could someone with that background make an effective decision in that context?
People also tend to fall back on what they know in unfamiliar circumstances, and I don't think you want an aircraft-manufacturer CEO falling back on picking the "cheapest option" and accepting am unappreciated safety risk in the process.
In every case? No. Not every business, not every industry needs that.
In cases where the company builds machines that millions of people every day depend on to not die, yeah, the leadership should probably know some of this, if only to be able to realize when someone is trying to blow smoke up their ass.
Yeah, he should probably trust the people below him, but the cost of having that trust be violated is way too high. The consequences aren't just a bunch of people losing their jobs, maybe local business being depressed because the nearby widget factory closed. The consequences are airplanes falling out of the sky and lots of people dying. So he needs to be able to verify that the information being given to him, that he's trusting, is actually trustworthy.
And nevermind the economic effects here. If people stop trusting certain aircraft as being safe, they're not going to care whose name is painted on the fuselage.
There is a misalignment of priorities that will never be fixed as long as the primary incentive for the CEO is to maximize shareholder value. If you remove that, and force the primary incentiven to be safety over profits, the rest of the business will follow.