View this link:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/11/confidence_men.php

Matthew Yglesias quotes this recent Megan McArdle piece, “Keep bailing…,” in The Atlantic:

Not that being a CEO is easy, or that they don’t do valuable work; I venture to say that 100% of the commentators who think that running a major company is a matter of riding around on the corporate jet and stealing from the workers and shareholders would be surprised at how quickly the company sank under them if they were thrust into that cushy sinecure.

Yglesias writes in response:

I think that running a major company is largely a matter of riding around on the corporate jet, etc., etc. But at the same time, I’m 100 percent sure that if you put me in charge of Proctor & Gamble, the company would sink like a stone. But that’s because there’s a big element of bluff to the whole thing…

…It’s just not the skill of beating the market through canny stock-picking, it’s the skill of tricking people into thinking they have that skill. That a lot of the people succeeding in business are sort of frauds (needless to say, other people get rich by inventing stuff that turns out to be incredibly lucrative and that’s a whole different sort of thing) doesn’t detract from the fact that the most successful among them are good at being frauds and that most people couldn’t do nearly as well.

Worth linking back to this article by Michael Lewis in Condé Nast Portfolio.