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Thanks for the comprehensive response. > There's nothing fungible about any of these responsibilities, so no matter how many ordinary people you stack together

• yowlingcat 4y ago
  > I think I'd disagree with that - you state it fairly strongly, but I think that each of the items you mention is possible to delegate and distribute successfully, to varying degrees. Much of that is aided by referring to existing patterns that have succeeded elsewhere. I think we're getting a lot closer to the meat of the issue here. I agree with you that it is possible to delegate and distribute /most/ of what I mentioned successfully to varying degrees. But that leaves the "incompressible" part of the CEO, which is fundraising/investor relations and hiring/org building. Fundraising is completely impossible to delegate (if you delegate that to someone else, you'll alienate investors) and even with hiring/org building, you have to at least do the recruiting/candidate selection of top lieutenants yourself as a CEO in order to make sure that you are putting the right team of divisional heads in place to execute. You have to be a better coach than the vast majority of coaches out there to succeed in this endeavor, and to even attract and accurately assess the kind of talent that will set up the org for success. It is very easy to mess this up. On the whole, a lot of what I'm talking about is high stakes high rewards strategic dealmaking. This isn't a common skill for most people to have. It's a blend of analytical (determining leverage points, BATNA in negotiations) and creative (figuring out how to grow the pie) that is hard to practice unless you've done it before. Most decisions you make here are irreversible. The other challenge with this kind of dealmaking is that the stakes are so high and the counterparties so formidable that if you put anyone except an equally formidable party in place to negotiate with them, you'd end up in a bloodbath that ended up unfavorably for the company and favorably for the counterparty. In my opinion, that's why we end up at the steady state of executive compensation across most of the world that we see today. It's a miserable job unless you really enjoy it because everyone will (and should) blame you when things go wrong. That is made more challenging by the fact that by the time one becomes a successful CEO, one can generally retire off earnings and/or become an investor with much better WLB and risk adjusted returns. PS: I'm also realizing another interesting petri dish where we could see parts of what you're suggesting play out are DAOs in crypto. Theoretically, if we can arrive at a DAO that works efficiently, it would serve as proof that for certain kinds of commercial organizations, the chief executive role may be able to be diminished or even eliminated. I am very curious about whether these experiments pan out (and inside my heart hope they do) although I remain skeptical.
  • vba616 4y ago
    > It's a miserable job unless you really enjoy it because everyone will (and should) blame you when things go wrong The idea that intelligence or hard work or danger justify executive pay defies common sense. People keep arguing it because they can't think of something better, and there must be some reason for a persistent feature of reality. But maybe a better explanation is simply that CEOs are being bribed, not to deliberately, neglectfully, or ideologically, wreck everything. If your job is to steer a huge ship, then the job might not be that difficult, but someone underpaid, and unmotivated could easily have tremendous impact on everybody else. And if money is the tool that you have, then you want people whose loyalty can be bought - possibly implying they have a neurotic attachment to money as a scorekeeping method. Of course that often doesn't work, but you can't stop trying.
    • yowlingcat 4y ago
      > The idea that intelligence or hard work or danger justify executive pay defies common sense. > People keep arguing it because they can't think of something better, and there must be some reason for a persistent feature of reality. By definition, common sense is not going to apply when it comes to running a modern nation or multi-national corporation. There is nothing common about what it takes to do these things successfully. > But maybe a better explanation is simply that CEOs are being bribed, not to deliberately, neglectfully, or ideologically, wreck everything. A thought-provoking idea but not sure it really comports with reality? CEOs almost always report to a board who can and will fire them for poor performance. If you were looking for a figure who is "being bribed, not to deliberately, neglectfully, or ideologically, wreck everything" then you'd be looking for the chairman of the board and large investors with highly concentrated positions. Of course, with any of these folks, reputation travels far, so the idea of them being bribed not to wreck everything is prima facie laughable; the reason they don't "want to wreck everything" is because they are looking to max their "society ELO" score. Social credit already exists and applies to people at this echelon of society.
      • vba616 4y ago
        >CEOs almost always report to a board who can and will fire them for poor performance Maybe? It's not an infallible deterrent and it doesn't remove the incentive to avoid the consequences of bad management in the first place. >If you were looking for a figure who is "being bribed, not to deliberately, neglectfully, or ideologically, wreck everything" then you'd be looking for the chairman of the board and large investors with highly concentrated positions. I have no idea what you mean. How are they bribed and how would they "wreck everything"? >idea of them being bribed not to wreck everything is prima facie laughable; the reason they don't "want to wreck everything" is because they are looking to max their "society ELO" score Who says that can't be done by destroying a company? All you have to do is convince yourself that the world would be better off, and that you're not afraid of the consequences to yourself.