91–100 of 156 posts
The CEO is the action organ of the board and is intended to be burnable. 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
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Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.
> mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy 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…
'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.
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those leaders come around so incredibly rarely, that movies get made about it!
True, but if you look at the top-performing companies, they tend to be driven by risk-taking, rule-breaking leaders.
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They replace C-level people often and the relationship isn't what you imply. 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…
> Monarchs play a fairly unimportant rol 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…
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.
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Most corporate structures are feudal. Folks should refer to their VPs as the Duke/Duchess of Engineering.
The modern corporation is literally a dictatorship: "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 agreeme…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.
"Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not" I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.
"Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not" I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ
> Shareholders are spending these extravagant sums for tasks that can now be done just as well by an AI program trained on 100 years of corporate reports and Wall Street Journal texts. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not. Being a CEO requires combining a lot of (sometimes nebulous) mental models, each with a degree of uncertainty, to some overall business strategy. I think it was Sam Harris who pointed out this is why there are child prodigies in subjects like math and chess, but none in something like political science.
"Chess also has a rigid, well-defined set of rules. Business does not" I believe every MBA Program, Management Department and Executive Coach would beg to differ
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Absolutely. 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.
This already happened once, in the 80s. A massive reduction of the 'middle class', by eliminating massive amounts of middle management. 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 som…
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.