Yes, some people are simply 100x more effective than others.
Assuming you step in and out of the office four times a day, do you think it's reasonable to hire someone solely to open and hand you an umbrella when you leave the office and take it from you when you return as a fair trade to the minute you might spend fiddling with the umbrella cover?
I would say that people that seem _much_ more efficient than other people are about 2.5x more efficient than them. Being able to do in a day or two what would take someone else a week, and most of this efficiency comes from experience not innate skills. The CEO market is limited in such a way that not everyone who acquires the skill and training to be a CEO can acquire a job that pays out 50 million.
Sure, why is this surprising? There's no hard limit to incompetence. A bad CEO can sink the ship; a bad manager can destroy the team; a bad product manager can make the product useless; a bad engineer might never deliver on any timescale. Hell, even a bad janitor could burn down the building.
"Training" is just not a very good metric of skill or value. If it were, they'd hire CEOs straight out of college.
Achieving 100x results isn't something you can guarantee, and it doesn't even involve writing a lot of code. It comes from blocking off a week to automate a task, and never having to deal with it again. It comes from having the experience and political capital to veto a project that would have wasted a year, because you've seen it go wrong before. It comes from improving some tools for the customer service reps, so that they're 5% more efficient (which then adds up to hundreds of hours a day if you're large enough).
Anyone CAN do this, but the people who have the insight, motivation, and skill to actually DO it are rare, and a smart organization should desire to keep them around for years just in case they do it a second time.
Do you think the senior devops guy who can single handedly debug a network issue while enjoying a day on the beach is lacking in experience compared to a CEO or did they just get a different type of experience because companies only need one CEO but they need a bunch of devops guys.
I believe a good group in upper management does improve company performance but 100x is unreasonable. There is a talent to being able to respond correctly to different scenarios but you also need to be lucky enough to be in a scenario where wild success is possible and your response is only made possible by the team of people that drive the engine beneath you.
Sure, if the board were running a karate-kid-style boot camp where they trained people to be CEOs, those kids market wages wouldn’t be that high. But in fact they are hiring CEOs who already have training and experience. There is no need to get into a nature vs. nurture debate, CEOs are being paid for both.
