Are executives really worth their pay

I recently read an interesting book called Retirement Heist which discusses the past and future state of pension plans from private industry. This was an interesting read from a couple of perspectives:

• Participant in the plan. If you participate in a private pension plan this book describes ways in which a company can reduce and eliminate benefits from the plan. An interesting point made in the book is that companies can use retirement plan surpluses to enhance income. There is also an interesting discussion about medical benefits and how even a slight reduction in medical benefits can serve as a legal precursor for a benefit elimination. 
• Investor. The book points out that there rank and file pensions are treated differently than executive pensions. Executive pensions are not required to be reported immediately (as are rank and file pensions) and thus can be treated differently (benefits not eliminated ...). Thus executive pensions, which sometimes exceed the cost of the rank and file pensions can be more difficult for investors to discover and thus make analysis of total compensation of a company harder.

What I find interesting is the double standard for compensation. The mutual fund industry, lead by Vanguard, has promoted low cost fund management. This even includes index funds that are essentially managed by a computer and thus extremely low cost to run. I am not convinced as an investor that the large compensation afforded to top executives are warranted for large companies. It would be an interesting experiment (like in the movie trading places) to replace an expensive management team with a low cost management team and see whether the executives really earn their money.