As long as the answer is "Yes," then CEOs are overpaid.
From what I have seen, "Qualified" too often means "A buddy of the guys on the board," which is obviously a limited pool. After having seen several great companies completely wrecked by glaring incompetents, after seeing many cases in which there was no correlation between compensation and performance, to me the answer is obvious: Many if not most CEOs are hugely overpaid.
The David Packards of the world deserve every penny they get, but there are not many of those.
Indeed. Cronyism is rampant, and virtually invisible, and virtually impossible to change. Well, it could be changed, but any cure is much worse than the illness.
A good CEO stays out of the way and lets his employees do their jobs. A great CEO can implement a vision to take the company to the next level.
Most CEOs get huge bonuses for harassing and worrying the golden goose to death, and have no more to do with the golden egges than the farmer. Most of them are little more than scam artists whose scam is selling themselves to ever higher bidders.
One of the most hilarious things I have seen is a worthless CEO laying off "dead wood" employees who then start another company that obliterates their old company from that part of the marketplace.