And yeah, I would expect a CEO to have enough legal knowledge to handle such a situation (customer communication) on his own.
But I also have to mentioned that I'm not in the US. Not every country has the litigation system of the US where you can basically destroy a company because you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself.
presuming you're referring to the hot coffee lawsuit, maybe read details of the story. McDonalds wasn't at all blameless, and the plaintiff had reasonable demands
Should the CEO also bang out some dev estimates for the roadmap because, hey, they should be competent enough to do something like that. Why not submit the accounts for the year? How hard can it be, just reading a few lines off their Sage or Quickbooks accounts?
What is the use of a CEO if not to have enough depth of knowledge about the different aspects of running a business?
Like what? Poor little CEO that doesn't understand anything about the world and how to run a company. Seems like helplessness is expected at every stage.
Bit of a difference between “having depth of knowledge in their business” and “can speak off-the-cuff with the necessary accuracy to remain in compliance with every contract and legal jurisdiction their organisation is engaged in, without consulting the numerous domain experts they employ for just this purpose,” isn’t there.
Also, such a situation that requires the CEO’s direct attention has already gone FAR beyond your standard incidents where you can throw out a pre written statement. Do you want your organisation just cuffing it from the top down? Are you Elon Musk in disguise?
If they are unprepared frankly they suck as CEO and should be thrown out. If only competency was a requirement for these jobs...
Take the lead, yes they should be able to as that's the job pretty much.
Act by themselves, sure they can make decisions in small cases. But on big things you hear everybody's input, weigh it, and only if needed, cast the deciding vote.