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> but what’s less obvious is that the majority is also pretty ignorant about the inner workings of executive leadership. Idk, I tend to think that people in p

> but what’s less obvious is that the majority is also pretty ignorant about the inner workings of executive leadership. Idk, I tend to think that people in positions of leadership overestimate their competence and ability to actually effect positive change in an organisation. They're kind of a monkey in the cockpit that we get to point at and say "Because of the monkey we are now doing x, y, z", but whether that monkey is a primate or a probability distribution seems irrelevant. We just watched the entire tech industry trend-follow and overhire, then layoff the overhires without any accountability as to how it happened, and you're positing there's some intangible skill here that a probability distribution can't replicate? Doubt. Tl;dr - I think executive leadership is careening towards a reckoning that even its entrenched cronyism will be unable to avert. It will take one automated COO or CEO and the whole MBA house of cards will come tumbling down. Real domain expert CEOs will always be around, but the MBA plant will go the way of the support agent.

dasil003 2y ago
> I tend to think that people in positions of leadership overestimate their competence and ability to actually effect positive change in an organisation. To the contrary, I think executives in large companies are far more lucid about how hard it is to effect change than you give them credit for. Of course they can't say that directly because they need to maintain the optics of control for a variety of reason, but in practice CEOs have lots of power but very little control. The levers they have are crude and subject to interpretation of humans up and down the chain. The more ambiguous and dynamic the business environment (eg. consumer tech) the more agency needs to be pushed down and the less specific of policies and procedures can be implemented. Despite all that, setting the culture and vision to get thousands of people rowing more or less in the same direction is important. My thesis is not that CEOs are highly competent as a group, it's that the problem is hard, and current forms of AI are nowhere close to be able to do anything approaching a better job on a consistent basis. Sure, in practice there are probably some businesses where an AI could outperform a CEO just by luck of the draw, but that's not going to convince owners and boards to swap out human CEOs. Humans can be held accountable and controlled with tried and true techniques of power and capitalism. An AI cannot be understood and manipulated as a human, if it gives owners/directors an answer they don't like, they have no real leverage or recourse. Going back to the engineers—or worse, a third party tech company providing the AI—is not going to work when urgent issues come up.

dasil003 2y ago

> I tend to think that people in positions of leadership overestimate their competence and ability to actually effect positive change in an organisation. To the contrary, I think executives in large companies are far more lucid about how hard it is to effect change than you give them credit for. Of course they can't say that directly because they need to maintain the optics of control for a variety of reason, but in practice CEOs have lots of power but very little control. The levers they have are crude and subject to interpretation of humans up and down the chain. The more ambiguous and dynamic the business environment (eg. consumer tech) the more agency needs to be pushed down and the less specific of policies and procedures can be implemented. Despite all that, setting the culture and vision to get thousands of people rowing more or less in the same direction is important. My thesis is not that CEOs are highly competent as a group, it's that the problem is hard, and current forms of AI are nowhere close to be able to do anything approaching a better job on a consistent basis. Sure, in practice there are probably some businesses where an AI could outperform a CEO just by luck of the draw, but that's not going to convince owners and boards to swap out human CEOs. Humans can be held accountable and controlled with tried and true techniques of power and capitalism. An AI cannot be understood and manipulated as a human, if it gives owners/directors an answer they don't like, they have no real leverage or recourse. Going back to the engineers—or worse, a third party tech company providing the AI—is not going to work when urgent issues come up.