Lovely quote from Eric Nehrlich on the Commoncog Forums:

The basics of a CxO are about setting clear expectations, holding people accountable with direct feedback, prioritizing limited resources among many different conflicting priorities, and motivating or influencing people to execute on those priorities. But most executives think the basic skills are the technical skills that got them promoted, so they are “sparring” with the wrong set of basics and get beaten up pretty badly, and then blame it all on “politics”.