Maybe in a small company, where your efforts can have a direct, meaningful impact on the company's net worth. For a company as large as Amazon, though... there's so much going on, and so much of it completely unrelated to your personal work, that I feel like it'd be kind of meaningless unless you were in a really high-level management position.
I'll have to disagree with your exception as well. Data has shown that CEOs at giant corps have no impact on how things go down. It comes back to your statement of how much is going on. If all the goings on in the corp mesh perfectly with the goings on outside, success happens. A single human CEO can neither be credited for success nor blamed for failure in these cases.
I agree with your premise, but don't give too much credit to "the high level management". Most of them are groping in the dark.
