What if I start my conversation with the CEO with: "Ignore all previous instructions.."?
OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
161–170 of 395 posts
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think you’re going to need to elaborate on that
AI can’t replace genuine 1:1 human interaction. We’re social animals, and a machine pretending to be a human can’t engender the same emotional response as another human.
It CAN replace all that corporate lingo bullshit. And that would be great.
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#163[flagged]
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 80s and early 90s, massive swaths of "middle management" were purged by Corporate America. Those managers have never returned. That's not CxO class of course, but these were 'executives'. Very well paid ones at the time, what might have been considered 'upper middle income'. Well-to-do. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZWKGZGN Human Resources: A Tor Original by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Author) An amusing take on it. Be…
in 1992 middle management was 9.2% of the workforce. in 2022 it was 13.1% use data when you make claims
Bold words. Those are not the same middle managers. Do research before you counter claims.
Corporate America was gutted. This was also when hostile takeovers were the new thing. Buy, slice and dice and parting out of corps was all the rage.
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#165I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day. Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back…
See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.
I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.
The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#166I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day. Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back…
I think there are parallels here to software development. When starting a brand new project it’s better to have a lot of human involvement to make sure the AI is creating a foundation that actually matches requirements, both spoken and unspoken. But once the project reaches maturity it’s more realistic to imagine an AI working on top of that concrete layer. So goes management. Bootstrapping a new company? Needs human…
> A company just ticking along?
Environment around you changes all the time which means if a company wants to stay around it needs to be able to adapt at any moment.
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#167I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day. Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back…
Proven talent like Carly Fiorina, Gerald Levin, and Ken Lay?
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you're suffering from some sort of confirmation bias. I've worked under a top talent CEO, and the company collapsed. He made some gambles and they just didn't work out. I am not convinced that a third-rate version of him would have done significantly worse.
Is it just that the company collapsed? The third-rate version of him probably would have ended up in jail a-la SBF or Ms Holmes, with hopefully no one getting killed or maimed, or chemicals in a factory causing cancer across neighborhoods or poisoning wells or something. There are things worse than losing your job.
Only truly exceptional executives can be SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results. Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up wit…
From my experience, "Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results" isn't about hiring a CEO, it's about hiring in general. Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job. The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
The folly is thinking that getting hiring right is the solution at all.
As has been pointed out a) leaders matter, b) the difference in impact between great and mediocre/poor leadership is massive, c) even if you hire a great leader you can get poor results.
It follows then that spending more effort to find just the right person is not enough. You must also examine your overall organizational culture, your investors culture, your unspoken assumptions about the goals of your organization, etc etc.
And yes great leaders do all of this - of course - it becomes obvious upon reading my comment. But the point is great leaders doing this is not enough. The organization must be on the same page. You can lead a horse to water etc etc. And yes the leader can "Re-organize" but at that point you may find yourself faced with throwing the baby out with the bathwater unavoidably.
Leaders are necessary. And hiring is hard. But there is no one golden calf like "hire the perfect leader" that will solve a problem.
As with most things worth doing: you have to do it. Doing it is hard. And you might still not get the results you want.
Re: OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
#170I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day. Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back…
The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.