Automate the CEOs
hamiltonnolan.com
hamiltonnolan.com
All the things mentioned in the article really are prime candidates for automation. But that's management, not leadership.
Management is primed to be automated. See Marshall Brain's book "Manna" for a great take on what's possible here.
Leadership is not. LLMs are great at doing the right things when there's a general consensus on what the right things are. Best practices, etc.
But what the current technology cannot do, and what I think LLMs specifically could never do, is know when to break the rules.
As Phil Knight may or may not have said (he was quoted in the new Air movie): You're remembered for the rules you break. That's leadership.
A great CEO needs to be a leader first and foremost, and a manager second.
A great secretary allows you to focus on getting development or whatever work you do in and out instead of on the day to day running of life.
I don't want a scrum master, I want a secretary.
As a manager, 90% of what I do as a manager is follow up with people, act as an escalation point for managing timelines, organizing who can do what, and none of this really is a skill related to my actual skillset.
Luckily I am able to commit to 20/hrs a week of development, but I could probably do 35 with a secretary - and use those last 5 hours to focus on strategy, direction, leadership stuff that's actually important.
At the time, there was an admin assistant who worked for our CTO, and she was fantastic - extremely detail oriented, organized and proactive. I kept thinking "All my training is in software engineering, and yet I'm doing all these tasks that she is much better at." Kept thinking that if my job was "split" down the middle that everyone would be much happier and my company would be getting a much better deal, with people's time largely spent on the stuff they are best at.
I hadn’t ever really thought about this until then. It seems like most companies just think “having an assistant or secretary is extravagance” so obviously they can’t afford it. But if they really knew what kind of unskilled grunt work highly-paid people spend so much time doing I think they would change their minds.
If I'd had a secretary or assistant or something to handle keeping on top of projects and KPIs, I would have been able to focus on being great as a leader. Alas, that wasn't an option, so I got out of the way for someone who excels as a manager to take my place.
On the plus side (and admittedly an aside as well), stepping out of that role allowed me to write and publish a book in 6 months, which is something I'd always wanted to do but couldn't find the time for.
You're right though, it's a valuable job being the glue of a business. In more than one way, not just work-wise. Social stuff matters too, and was often the domain of the secretaries.
If you look at things through the lens of social status signalling among primates, an awful lot becomes clear. Consider office arrangements. What primates like is having:
- a private space to retreat to, and
- a team/family shared space, and
- a tribal/company shared space that strangers can be invited to visit, often decorated to show off success/wealth.
Control is established by the leaders awarding better territories to themselves and favorite allies, and by removing private spaces for those of low status. The worst insult is to remove space ownership altogether for some low status people, making them "hot desk" or "hotel".
Part of the problem is that some of the time this was supposed to free up was consumed by managing the tech itself.
If you tell HR that some guy should go, be it a liberal arts major or a psychologist, they're gonna employ any trick they know to nudge the guy out of his job. In fact, the psych might be even more effective
that's not the goal
I have almost this exact conversation with folks all the time. The majority of managers are dead weight and often have a negative impact on performance and culture.
Leaders (natural or learned) are incredibly valuable.
Managers are overhead.
Managers aren't overhead, it's an absurd statement, because it's an absolute. Managers allow leaders to extend their reach. Absolutely no leader can scale beyond a certain point. At all.
Managers allow for that. They're essential, beyond a certain org size.
Now, I will agree that some should not be managers! But that is the same for any profession. You need to churn, to chop off those not performing, or poorly suited to the task.
Ultimately for a company to succeed, people need to be aligned, and in an emotional space to do good work. That is very hard to automate. Google found they could not.
I'm not saying AI could never do that, but the current generation of AI is nowhere near this capability. It'll take innovation beyond LLMs to get there.
To be clear, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I just think it's inevitable. I'd probably consider it a good thing if it wasn't for the loss of all those middle-class jobs.
This is also why I recommend Marshall Brain's "Manna". He nailed it. AI isn't coming for entry-level jobs. Not right away. Because manual labour is actually incredibly complex to replicate with AI. But it's coming for the middle, whether we like it or not.
I say this as someone who has spent most of my career in middle management, for context.
The problem with so much management - the reason the rest of us hate it - is that it's already too formulaic, too inhumane and empathy-free, too much of people as machines rather than as people. Replacing that with actual machines is not the solution. It's just more cost-cutting at the expense of workers.
(Yes, I realize OP was satire. The points on both sides still stand.)
As an engineer for 40 years, I don't need to be led. I know what needs to be done.
I would say "leadship" is a highly emotional (on both sides) behaviour that would be perfectly fit by a solution based on historical statistical analysis.
80% of CEO's could easily be replaced in a few years, then that can trickle down to other managers, and eventually lead towards more "flat" organizational hierachies which hopefully are more equitable and pay better for all employees, not just a rich few.
His interpretation of them is that they act as the carbon control rods in the nuclear reaction of capitalism. Prior to their invention, we had workers and owners. And then we had a lot of strikes and worker solidarity and other nasty socialist things like that. Then we invented middle managers for all the workers to get mad at instead and shield the owners from all the ire and rock throwing.
Rao's interpretation is overtly tongue-in-cheek, but makes a good point. That middle managers aren't strictly there for productivity, but act also in an emotional/human-nature/psychological capacity.
I think most people associate the term middle management with the guy immediately above them.
Honestly, a lot of this resembles the "If only the Tsar knew!" mentality in old, imperial Russia.
Which is not to say that AI won't be immensely helpful for running companies; just that once you're in the role for two days you realize that replacing that role entirely isn't going to happen.
> AI can win at chess now. You think being a CEO is harder than chess? Come on.
Being a CEO isn't like playing chess. Being a CEO is more like a really complex version of self-driving cars. Why? Because it involves interacting with other humans, all the time. It's all people problems.
Chess isn't. Chess is decision-making with a finite (if immense) set of possibilities. Very different set of problems.
Journalists might very well say the same thing (when people who've never been journalists talk about replacing them with AI).
>They did this to themselves.
And who set this bad direction? The CEO. This hardly adds to the case for not replacing him with an AI.
And it's not like some CEO decided "hey, let's pivot to churning out low-quality clickbait because I really like that stuff." They were forced to by the shift of ad budgets from print to more targeted advertising and the consolidation of news readership into a small number of well-known publications. Though I do agree that it's equally unfair to blame journalists for this.
Indeed. As with almost everything else terrible about the world today, the root of the problem is targeted-advertising-based business models.
Only if you consider it to be inevitable that their primary goal is to make themselves and their owners preposterously rich.
That actually sounds a lot like model based reinforcement learning. AlphaGo still had an explicit model of a perfect information game, but newer algorithms are capable of learning the rules of games like Minecraft with very little prior information.
The problem is that the real world is still much more complicated and hard to access for machines. However, I wouldn't say it is a fundamentally different problem, but rather a matter of scale. That's part of the reason why AI research spent so much effort on building game playing systems.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/new-g...
'Scaling' IMO is one of the things SWEs harp on a lot, to the extent that they see it as a solution to every problem. This is in part because they recognize that software scales well. When you're a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ
There's a structural power relationship in play. Monarchs play a fairly unimportant role these days but many countries still have them and compensate them handsomely.
CEOs are structurally capitalist monarchs. Sometimes it's even a hereditary position. They even do the corporate equivalent of court and heraldry stuff.
They're compensated not based on competency but instead, like every other job, via social arrangement.
If you don't think that's how salaries work, you're getting underpaid.
"form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations."
Companies are *governed* by unimpeachable, unelected, all powerful groups that in practice treat employees like literal slaves (you don't have to be chattel or physically abused to be a slave). However because almost all employment agreements are exactly the same, it's the same law firms and laws that these orgs use over and over, essentially all corporations have colluded for this structure and type of employment power dynamic.
After all why wouldn't they, the "American dream" is to become a dictator in the capital class, free from exposure to dirty labor.
How do I know this?
I've been a CEO dictator for a company before and hated the structure. Now I'm trying to create a non-stock cooperative and all I get is head scratching from banks, lawyers etc... who have NO CONCEPT how to organize something that isn't in the boilerplate Delaware equity dictatorship construct.
(1) Instead of saying a representative can't represent more than 10-100 people, have you considered making it a percentage of the membership? Making it a hard number seems potentially inflexible as the organization grows.
(2) Making it a requirement that the CEO be a part of the organization for 4 years before running would imply that either the first CEO didn't have to meet such criteria, or that there is no CEO for the first 4 years.
Very curious to follow your journey!
In both of those cases the spirit it to build structural breakpoints in such that it’s harder to accelerate than it is to stop. In my experience speed is what kills ethics.
So my guess is that we’ll be without a CEO for a while so our annual plan etc processes won’t really start in earnest until we’re at a certain size.
You can read our “Constitution” / Articles in the link
We’re “fundraising” now which is basically just issuing debt based on a negotiated interest rate and due date, so if you know anyone with 5k or more to spare that would be great. Obviously regular capitalist investors want nothing to do with us, which just makes it harder/slower and that’s ok.
I don’t want to see any company that I want to succeed making decisions like a democracy does today.
Obviously some deep reconsideration has to be done
My position is that democracy works well when the will of the people gets translated into action in a way that still resembles what those people organically need.
Marketing is the process of tampering with that translation such that what actually happens benefits the marketers' customers, typically at the expense of the people.
Presumably there are practices and technologies that we could invest in which preserve this translation, but we haven't been investing in those. Instead we've been investing in marketing. We're building a world where you can spend money to shape public opinion, and that's a world that's toxic to democracy.
Perhaps there was a time when information about available goods and services was hard to come by. Maybe you legitimately needed somebody to get the word out. But I don't think we live in that world anymore.
In case you're not familliar with "the shoe event horizon":
> As a society sinks into depression, the people of the society need to cheer themselves up by buying themselves gifts, often shoes. It is also linked to the fact that when you are depressed you look down at your shoes and decide they aren't good enough quality so buy more expensive replacements. As more money is spent on shoes, more shoe shops are built, and the quality of the shoes begins to diminish as the demand for different types of shoes increases. This makes people buy more shoes.
> The above turns into a vicious cycle, causing other industries to decline.
> Eventually the titular Shoe Event Horizon is reached, where the only type of store economically viable to build is a shoe shop. At this point, society ceases to function, and the economy collapses, sending a world spiralling into ruin. In the case of Brontitall and Frogstar World B, the population forsook shoes and evolved into birds.
That's what is happening to us, except instead of shoes, it's ads. We're diminishing the legitimacy of making a good product or being a good leader, because an easier way to win is just pay to shape public opinion.
What you win isn't as good as it would have been if you competed on merit, but that doesn't matter because competing on merit is hard and your opposition isn't doing it.
So I'm saying that it's Marketing vs Democracy and Marketing is winning. Thus we're living in Marketing's endgame and not Democracy's endgame.
For context, I just published a book called Insurgent Marketing. The central thesis is that the world is being shaped by propagandists, has been for a long time, and that the best (and most pragmatic) way to combat their influence is to play their game better than they do.
All businesses market themselves. Try running a business without doing anything remotely resembling marketing, and let me know how that goes. But that doesn't mean marketing (and marketers) should get a free pass for the damage many of us cause.
I think of marketing as neither positive nor negative in it itself, much like speaking or any form of communication. Some of us speak love. Some of us speak hate. Most of us spew garbage.
The problem isn't marketing, per se, but human greed. Both are as old as written history, and probably older. By blaming marketing, we excuse ourselves from taking responsibility of our role in shaping the world around us. The problem is "other people", those evil marketers. (Or politicians. Or bankers. Or the alt-right. Pick your bogeyman.)
Regarding this "Shoe Event Horizon", I hadn't heard of it before. My initial take is that as long as businesses keep getting bigger, quality will suffer. But we live in a time when it's easier (not easy, just easier) to launch a business of your own and produce shoes (or any product) of the quality you're looking for. Yes, most people will shop at Wal-Mart for the cheapest thing. Again, human greed, on behalf of both the corporation and the customers.
But thanks to technological advances, we're at a turning point where anyone with a smartphone can effectively market their goods. It's not the sole domain of corporations and governments anymore.
My hope, and my personal belief, is that more people will seize this opportunity so that we start to see an explosion of independent entrepreneurs producing products they're proud to stamp their names on.
I like where you're trying to go re: independent entrepreneurs. If that were the norm I'd likely have no bone to pick with marketing.
I'm skeptical, though, because I think that having 2x as much money doesn't just make you 2x better at shaping the narrative as the other guy, it makes you 4x better. So power concentrates in the hands of the few, and it's their misbehavior that I take issue with.
> By blaming marketing, we excuse ourselves from taking responsibility of our role in shaping the world around us.
If all we do is blame, then yes. But I don't really blame marketing. As you say, something like it has been going on forever. I blame technologists like myself for building the web in a way that that is so easily abused by marketers and propagandists.
I want to see a world where it's considered rude to share a link data that contains ads, or malicious javascript, or anything else with ulterior motives. Instead, you should strip the malware and share the cleaned version.
That's an unreasonable ask in today's web. Ain't nobody got time to re-host cleaned copies of everything they want to talk about. But in a content-addressed world, it's a little different, users have a bit more control over which version gets circulated.
So I'm trying to build a web where it's easier for users keep it clean and harder for outsiders to corrupt. It's slow going, practically everything root-of-trust is off limits (dns, ssl, ...), but at least it feels like meaningful work.
I can’t help that Google and Facebook track everything, but I CAN avoid using those aspects of their tools.
I like to target based on content, not user profiles. Google Search ads, for example. Yes, Google is absolutely building profiles on everything you click, but we don’t have to use their remarketing tools and the like. We can simply say “show my ads on related content” or “show my ads on related searches”.
Do most marketers do that? Absolutely not. But I’d like to think the tide is turning, if only because of the public backlash.
If you acquire multiple companies well then, fun times for you.
Court politics and C level politics are functionally very similar too.
It may look like that, but it's not true. You know how a good system administrator doesn't seem that important because he prevents all the fires that a bad one would heroically put out? The mere presence of a monarch, not even his actions, acts in a similar fashion. They don't have to actively govern the country, but they have emergency powers that would allow them to prevent a wanna be populist dictator. And because of obvious game theory implications, these powers never have to be used — their mere existence, and everybody bring aware of their existence, is enough for deterrence.
So I'll have to toss a citation needed on this one. I think history demonstrates a pretty strong overlap between those who support monarchs and populist dictators because in practice, they are structurally pretty similar.
Do you have any evidence that boards would not do this?
Can you give one or two examples?
For example, Baker, Bivens & Schieder (2019), "Reining in CEO compensation and curbing the rise of inequality", suggests that compensation for CEOs "is more likely to reflect CEOs’ close ties with the corporate board members who set their pay." https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-...
Bebchuk and Fried (2004), "The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation", is a literal book discussing it all; it suggests (amongst other things) that CEO remuneration is not always closely tied to company performance but can be influenced by peer benchmarking and the interdependence of corporate boards.
An old (1992) article in Management Review (V81, Issue 5) "Can we put the brakes on CEO pay?", contains suggestive ideas such as "Most CEOs have invited these people to be on board," Denton adds. "It's easy [for directors to be relatively generous.", so this is by no means a new situation.
And of course, veteran shareholder activist Rob Monks has been complaining about all this, and a lot more, for decades.
Lots of people want to be CEO (until they become CEO and until they make CEO kind of money)
By the first 3 months reality sets in and the person now in the CEO role understands that they are so far removed from the action that they are essentially relegated to the role of spokeperson and cheerleader, at maximum the role of general moving imaginary troops on a fictional battlefield.
If they can make peace with their role of political spokeperson and cheerleader they'd bail out as soon as they reach 5M net worth no debt. No less than 95% would bail out.
The remaining 5% would bail out once they reach 10M net worth no debt.
CEOs turnover and population is so low because it takes a special kind of monodimensional individual to have the world as your oyster 5-10M in your name and no debt and turn around and say "I'd rather go to work and pretend to be at the helm of an imaginary ship instead"
You are assuming here that boards are always acting in the best interest of the share holders. I bet there are many who do, but there are at least as many that act primarily in the interest of themselves. Board membership is a lucrative job without much supervision, if any at all. So nothing is keeping board members from taking it easy. Why rock the boat if this can make you known as difficult? You might not get that 2nd or 3rd board membership then anymore.
You might remember Credit Suisse, the major bank that had to be taken over recently by UBS to avoid bankruptcy: until then it had gone from scandal to scandal for 15 years in a row. 2 CEO's had been sent away in that period (by shareholders) but the president of the board? He could stay, and with him the rest of the board. His salary? 7 million a year.
The whole purpose of title inflation is to direct money to your friends with plausible deniability.
Now someone will bring up the rare cases where a CEO actually did something. That does not disprove the rule.
Citation needed, etc. I think this is just meant to be funny but if anyone wants it to be more than that I’d need to see some actual proof.
The quote from the article is clearly from someone who has never run a company, of size at least.
People have a very hard time being good CEO's, AI will not make that happen any time soon.
(I'd be cool with CEOs making less than 400x their workers though)
Power is the ability to do more work, faster.
I'm paid well. Do everything I'm told. Top performer. I'm happy though as I'm providing for the family. My accomplishments amount to one day of effort, output, results every month.
This has been happening for years.
I am curious how many of me exist. The Twitter firing suggests that's it's over 50% so it's that's true, what exactly are managers doing?
Most tell me they're in meetings, looking over spreadsheets and meeting with staff. I run my house and meet with my spouse for about twenty minutes a quarter over financials. Everything is automated. Everything is scheduled. We are adults. Labor is divided, assigned, adjusted as we age.
Large companies get in the position of not reducing head count because, yes, they're people with lives and relationships matter.
Solution? I'm thinking more of a State style employment but limited. If hired, you're job is secure for five years. Automate you job entirely? Good on you! Do not apply...... TAKE a new job in the company. You're slow to onboard? Fine. Dead weight? Not renewed.
Take the fear of insecurity off the table. People will behave according to their character.
who makes ceo-bot? people. not ceo people, but that paints ceos too harshly, to act like only they can do wrong. (they just do it with such gusto.)
people are the problem. society. culture. not the existence, the current implementation.
maybe in a few years.
bug reports can be submitted to the internet. no guarantees of effort are tied to such a report.
most importantly, outsourcing the issue is somewhat the issue itself.
At any point The board decides that the organization is not providing maximum financial compensation back to the board and shareholders, the CEO will be replaced for someone that will.
That’s the role of a CEO and nothing more
If there’s a world in which a group of rich people can pay for a technical system that will rigorously seek profit via managing all the employees, at a rate lower than they would pay a CEO, and with equivalent effectiveness? 100% this will happen.
Reminds me of this ST Voyager episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Care_(Star_Trek:_Voya...
Also who do you call out when they make a bad decision? When people want blood, they want the person they’re attacking to bleed.
But AI CEO is so blatantly “saying the quiet part out loud” that it’s just comically maligned.
Neoliberal solutions dont work on the captains of the neoliberal order.
If you want to bring CEOs to heel the best way to to organize, unionize and strike (if youre not a dev) or unionize and/or covertly work to rule (if you are).
Probably they won't - as a profession it completely lacks class consciousness, as underscored so neatly by this comment of yours.
The resultant talent oversupply caused by people chasing middle class wages via bootcamps and an overwhelming lack of solidarity will likely end up with the profession being paid somewhere between "starving physics PhD" and "plumber" for most roles.
Striking will probably be tried a few times but, judging by how many software systems ive seen tick over for months with 0 developers, it's likely to fall flat on its face.
Why is unionizing and striking not ok for devs? That seems a little cowardly
Software developers aren't police, doctors or nurses. There is no safety argument.
I've had a few conversations with people who have said the same thing, and the conclusion has been that they don't want to strike because they do not want to lose their jobs, and because culturally they view themselves differently from all of those other people. That sounds cowardly to me- especially when folks like you advocate covert disobedience (i.e., sabotage) instead of overt disobedience like striking.
EDIT: I see in a sibling comment that you say software systems can keep running without software developers, and that is why you judge them to be different. In my experience that is only partly true, but in combination with the push for code automation, I can understand the fear that if software developers strike, they will be replaced by AI. I actually think that is more reason to strike and strike now. It is up to software developers to create those job replacing AI systems. Like you said, software developers lack class consciousness- that is more the reason to raise consciousness now- and the best way is through overt action.
Ironically it looks like the truck drivers and shelf stackers will be the last people to go.