for example: a company ceo might decide that say building a new box which does 3G access with deep-packet-inspection etc might be a very fruitful area to get into. most likely, he doesn't (shouldn't ?) know innards of say http/pop/imap etc etc.
grunts need to implement that. do you still feel you don't need someone closer to the worker-bees who can translate one lingo (techno-babble) into another (mgmt-speak) ?
I agree with your statement to a certain extent. It's the "travel" part that I think is not necessarily true.
Everyone (pertinent) must know everything (pertinent). And once information is ubiquitous, it will no longer need to travel.
As far as translating from one person's lingo into another (whether it's CEO<->Programmer or otherwise), then you can't argue with that. On the other hand, if the CEO and the worker's were able to understand each other directly, then you would have a much more efficient organization.
I would say that the latter example has an advantage over the former.