They made decisions relevant to their work. i.e. it's not that a random employee would go our and acquire a competitor or buy a business jet for themselves (though in theory they could but that theory never got put to a test). So the CEO still made CEO-level decisions and employees made decisions in their area while needing to ask themselves what's best for the company, economically, just like the president should. Trust people to do their job kind of thing really, trust teams to work together etc.
Is ‘responsibility’ really something that deserves outsized compensation compared with, say, actually creating the product being sold? In this context, it doesn’t seem to come worth outsized personal consequences for failure, indeed quite the opposite. I agree there should be some consideration for the additional stress, but not multiple extra figures on the salary.
> for the new insurmountable levels of responsibilities right?
As it turns out, companies that don't concentrate all of the power and decision-making in one person tend to avoid ending up with "insurmountable levels of responsibilities".
And compensated at a president’s salary for the new insurmountable levels of responsibilities right?