"Here comes the airplane!" is a little game that I like to play with PMs so they get to enjoy me punching them in the face. Aren't we all having fun now, how wonderful!
Execs can't do this themselves because they don't have the information they need, and are trying to be predictable and compete in a market. So think about it as an ELI5 exercise where you're infantilizing up, or as it's more commonly and professionally referred to, managing up, or more plainly, helping the business make better decisions.
I often feel the frustration when I'm writing some data-crunching report-extraction thing, of the knowledge that the output of it will be some administrator squinting shrewdly at it and thinking himself better informed. Then he'll do pretty much whatever he would be doing anyway.
And that's the better case. I suspect in many cases they don't look at the information they ask for at all.