CEO

In my head, the CEOs of major corporations are magical super-humans. People that can some how manage billions of dollars and millions of employees. And while this is true in an abstract sense, those CEOs are not directly managing every dollar, and every employee.

I forget that CEOs are humans just like me. They may be older, with more life experiences under their belt, but at the end of the day, they're just as capable of making a mistake as I am. What they have going for them is the process. Mr. CEO says, "We're doing this thing X this year." But he then leaves it to the finance gurus to figure out the money part, and to the implementation specialists to figure out the human and physical resources they'll have to allocate, and then that stuff goes through the next step of the VPs maybe, then on to the managers, and on down eventually to the grunts on the floor.

What gives the CEO his super power is the thirty bajillion checks along the way, and allowing the people who make those checks to have enough power to also make the correction needed. This is how stuff happens, how things get done. The distribution of power seems key to the success of any large organization.