It's kinda their job to not listen. CEOs get bombarded with thousands of pieces of information each week. If they shifted the company direction each time, the company would get nothing wrong. In the immortal words of Ribbonfarm, "CEOs don't steer":

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/

A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.

I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted? Employees are economic agents too, and oftentimes competitors are more than happy to hire out of their competition.

>A good CEO will let in just the little bit of information that saves the company - this was Andy Grove's pivot to focus on microprocessors over memory chips, or Steve Jobs's turnaround of Apple. You didn't have a good CEO, and got your average mediocre CEO that sets a strategic direction and sticks with it regardless of what the market says.

Still too simplistic. Yeah, they need to filter information and say no to things constantly, I get that is a core skill. If something is repeatedly being brought up by members of your core teams, you should at least look at what they're saying and ask where they are coming from. That is simply good sense. There is a persistence factor in involved in each of these cases that are the source of the frustration.

If what constitutes a good CEO is allowing in the 'little bit of information that can save the company' (really thats a call about identifying useful information before anyone else), objectively most companies have terrible CEOs, and I question the value of the position entirely on that basis, especially at larger public companies.

FWIW, at each of these companies I worked at, the headcount was at most in the hundreds. I was only 2 clicks below the executives in the company tree, there wasn't a lot of barrier to interaction there, which is what I find even more baffling about the whole thing.

>I'm curious though, if you knew your employer was going under, why not jump ship to the competitor that actually did understand what customers wanted?

I did this twice. In the one instance I wasn't able to get moving faster than things were going down hill. Partially, this is a symptom of just how long interview cycles have become over the years. Took me longer than expected, but moreover, the company conducted the layoff faster than I really thought they would. I got the timing wrong by a little bit, it happens.

Its not like you identify an issue one time either, its the repeated ignoring of what happens despite repeated sustained efforts to raise the awareness where it needs to be.