CMV: CEOs for infrastructure and utilities companies need to be selected from those that actually done ground work

So, public utilities and infrastructure (such as public transportation) are the type of companies that you must ensure that the best are competent for the job, even the heads. Trouble is that most tend to be run from the finance side of things. But you say, the job of a CEO is to approve things and judge for themselves (besides the chief financial officer) on what is appropriate and what else from the guys in finance? Trouble is, when you put the guys in finance in charge of a company in charge of building things....well, things tends to go south. Look at Boeing for example. They were a company that prided itself on building sound products and well, the moment that they brought McDonnel Douglas (which was a how could we make something that sells first, sound product second)...things started going south in terms of safety. Sure, stuff might not fall out of the sky but well, you don't want to screw up a water main or delay trains for too long.

It gets worse with an actual outsider who never actually did grunt work in said company. Look at my country. Singapore for example. One of the state owned companies there (SMRT) tends to have a lot of generals from the army as head to the point that someone edited Wikipedia to make SMRT CEO an actual rank in the Singapore Army. Sure, a commissioned officer needs to have personal management skills and it gives them something to do but you actually need someone from the ground work to actually head the company to ensure that it can provide the services it should provide to others efficiently.

I think it would be best if CEO from those companies are selected from ground level technicians or any ground work (construction) who actually know what they should work with a minimum of maybe 5 to 10 years on technical work before being assigned to CEO. This would ensure that a utilities company (especially state owned companies) provide the services they need since the CEO would ensure that they won't lose direction of what they actually are supposed to be providing. To prevent the Peter Principle (promote to incompetence), a selected CEO candidate would also take up training for management to ensure that he or she would be also be equipped for management.

CMV