Ever seen someone doing their “unskilled job” all their life? It’s just fucking magic!
The truth is that capitalists hate skilled workers, because those workers have bargaining power. This is why they love the sort of automation which completely removes workers or thought from the equation, even if the ultimate solution is multiple times more expensive or less competent than before.
Nothing is more infuriating to a boss, than a worker that can talk back with experience.
First off, I’d argue that there are vanishingly few truly unskilled jobs - merely that the entry barrier to them are so low that most fully able adults can pick them up in a short amount of time.
I ran into this exact topic roughly half a year ago - so here’s a somewhat rewritten version of what I wrote up, specifically about the skills of company executives - a group which CEOs are a part of.
So, executives. There is no ‘exact’ skill set specific to executives, as there are many types. There are however skills and traits that many have in common that are useful.
I’ll split them into three vague groups.- “politicians”, managers and industry experts.
The first category are social power players more than anything getting into their position due to connections and charisma. Their importance is playing the loyalties of other people - widely considered the most useless execs, even in business circles. If they’d be categorized by “skillset”, it’d be people skills (leadership) and connections to important people.
Managerial executives are usually focused on economy (i.e resource management) and the running of an organization. They’ll often have both experience and academic knowledge of organizational structures, asset management and economics, helping their organization (at least on paper) make the most of their resources. They can be good at their job, but if they get too focused on the “on paper” economics they fall into the category of “greedy, money grabbing fucks who ruin everything they touch”.
The last and (in my mind) best category are the industry experts. Often they’ll have come from within a company or organization and have in-depth knowledge of how things work and what is “important” in a business. These sorts are the “boring” ones we don’t hear much about, often having started their a business and grown it, or climbed the ranks from within and sat in leadership for decades. On the flip side they’ll have opinions without any obvious basis, “This is just how it is done”, which is in many cases important, but in others pure BS.
In all three categories you’ll find execs who are good and bad in different ways and also offend your sensibilities in different ways.