Reminds me of a part in 'Stolen' by Grace Blakeley (highly recommend) where she discusses why CEO salaries have increased so much and why they often get paid in stock these days instead of a salary. One of the reasons is that they would often make decisions not based on what was necessarily good for shareholders but what would increase their own power or status. For example, arranging a merger between two companies might not always be a very profitable idea, but it does mean that the CEO gets further ahead in the dick-measuring contest as they're now in charge of a larger business with more employees. Making the CEO themselves a shareholder helps to prevent this kind of thing happening, but for lower ranked managers or heads of departments (who are still salaried and will obviously be more involved in both the recruitment and day-to-day running of their departments in large businesses) the same incentive for inefficient, unprofitable, dick-measuring bullshit is still there. Like you said, if all the other managers have their own secretary, you're going to want one (or several), too.