Page "Hierarchical organization" Paragraph 5

In business, the business owner traditionally occupied the pinnacle of the organization.

In most modern large companies, there is now no longer a single dominant shareholder, and the collective power of the business owners is for most purposes delegated to a board of directors, which in turn delegates the day-to-day running of the company to a managing director or CEO.

Again, although the shareholders of the company are the nominal top of the hierarchy, in reality many companies are run at least in part as personal fiefdoms by their management ; corporate governance rules are an attempt to mitigate this tendency.