My experience of pilot' ability to manage multi-million concerns is based on the bitter experience of being around when the experts screwed it up.
I doubt that one pilot in a hundred could or should make it to the board. However, over the years the pilots have proved very adept at making calculations on the back of a fag packet that subsequently proved correct.
We can all work out the approximate operating costs of the aircraft, we can estimate the revenue from what pax tell us and the offers we see in travel shop windows.
Putting the two together is simple enough. Unfortunately when we have then mentioned, to one of those "meet the bosses" meetings, the losses we must be incurring on specific routes, we were always told that we didn't see the overall picture and that everything was fine.
Perhaps we should introduce CRM to the boardroom!