I find that CEOs are often the last to realize or admit the reality of suckitude a company is under.

I mean if you did your job right as CEO, you are the dumbest person there. You spend all your time being upbeat and optimistic in public (maybe horribly depressed in private?). Your engineers and managers, who are experts in divining information out of the smallest bits of data (single line bugs anyone?) are much smarter than you realize.

I have rarely seen a CEO that I completely respect. They just don't have the ability to aggregately integrate every detail in the company and tend to lead things to a crash and burn as a result.