> Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake.
Yes, faking that really well is basically equivalent to actually doing it for real.
Of course, there are many good and worthwhile things an exec could have done that wouldn't show up in such a demo.
Eg if you increase reliability of your cloud services from 99.9% to 99.9999% that could be huge, but most likely wouldn't show up in a short demo.
On the bullshitting front: I remember a particular re-organisation we went through at Goldman Sachs that the local bigwig was explaining to us, and all the benefits it would bring. I made the perhaps unwise decision to ask what observable measurements we could take in a few months to tell us whether the whole thing was a failure (or success).
(I suspect the actual main purpose of these semi-regular re-orgs is to shake things up enough so that after a few shuffles person A can eventually land ahead of his former boss B, without anyone ever losing face. And that's a good thing! But hard to admit to.)
A CEO just needs to make sure that stuff gets done; doing it personally is just one of the ways to get there. (And not a particularly scalable one.)
For Apple it probably made sense, because the whole company's image and reputation is built on that stick.
But eg for a toilet paper manufacturer or a producer of fighter jets, the CEO shouldn't spend too much time personally testing the products.
For the former, because presumably the product doesn't change that often.
For the latter, because there's not even a single 'user' of the product. The experience of the huge ground crew (with various specialised roles) is just as important as the experience of the guy in the cockpit, etc. No CEO, and actually no single person on earth, has the expertise to judge all of these aspects of use by themselves.
That doesn't mean the experience of the users is irrelevant. Just the opposite! But the CEO will have to intelligently delegate.
But lots of execs don't know enough about their own products to interrogate like that. So they settle for BS presentations.