I'm sure it's an incredibly difficult job. Interesting it's still such a common way to run organizations. Sounds like it'd be better, more scalable, cheaper, safer etc. to not depend on a single person with extremely unusual skills for the company to function.
Well, in a way you're simply describing the job of the C Suite minus the CEO -- the CFO, CTO, CSO, and so on.
But each of the C Suite members can't spend all their time staying up-to-date and coordinated on everything each other is doing, and they'll also often disagree.
So you need somebody to manage the C Suite, understand and integrate and make decisions... and that's the CEO.
At the end of the day, somebody has to be in charge, or else it's either a) anarchy or b) incredibly inefficient as too much time is taken up in NxN communication and lengthy group debating and decision-making.
And somebody who's capable of managing every C Suite member effectively, whose areas span the entire company... that's going to be an inherently fiendishly difficult and complex job.
Even just co-CEO organizations have usually been a disaster. Companies can and do delegate decision-making--even to the point of having relatively autonomous divisions. This can work reasonably well. It can also mean that the CEO is mostly involved in financial engineering (GE, private equity much of the time) or you end with warring fiefdoms competing with each other (Ballmer-era Microsoft).
Large companies can accomplish things that smaller companies cannot but keeping the ship reasonably on course is a really hard organizational problem. When I was an analyst and spent a fair bit of time with senior execs at tech companies, I often saw how much fragmentation and lack of coordination there was among different groups. But my wonder wasn't that this existed but that the companies were able to function at all.
