The only way to know a business is to know the culture, the supply chains and customer interactions, and the day-to-day functionality of it. And that requires actually working on the ground level. You need to be able to model it somewhat, but usually a high school level of education is enough.

The posh heads can come in with their KPIs and their agendas, but they will never understand the business as well as a perceptive grunt who paid attention in a few math, English, biology, psychology, and economics classes. Or just a perceptive grunt who reads books.

Any capitalist business that doesn't have a good idea of the reality on the ground (which is most of them) is going to have a huge exploitable weakness.