Why don't Operations Research and Systems Engineering...

[Ludic]

...professional become CEO's rather than consultants?

I've been doing a lot of studying into operations research and system engineering and I concluding they're nearly the same thing with a few minor differences. Source: http://vperdigon.blogspot.com/2009/11/systems-engineering-vs-operations.html

And after looking into the job discriptions of the two, it seems like you're really advanced consultants that higher management would seek advice from. But if you're really that skilled with mathematical and computational models, why aren't these people (OR & SE pros) running everything rather than being a consultant? I would imagine an OR/SE pro to have a better skill set than some MBA type.

Would an analogy be comparable to a ship-nagivator vs ship-captain?

[Party_Key]

If I am understanding you correctly,

I have thought about this too, but to me personality, I don't want to run the company. I enjoy solving problems. I am not good at mathematics, as good as I should be (as you will see below), but I still enjoy solving problems. Consultants solve problems that are clearly defined. CEOs solve problems that can't be defined. Running a company is a set and problems solved by ORs/MSs (or system engineers, not sure who they are though) are elements in the set. I don't know how many elements there are in the set.