Comment by Arodex
8 days ago
>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns.
We should start to question whether soaring CEO salary spending is delivering meaningful results.
8 days ago
>Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns.
We should start to question whether soaring CEO salary spending is delivering meaningful results.
Ah, that's not how it works : CEOs are rich so they are successful. They are successful so they are rich. Q.E.D.
Maybe in your fantasy world.
In reality people are rarely rich based on merit alone.
EDIT: Sorry it was a really clever joke.
It's sarcasm, obviously.
I think you missed the joke.
>>>EDIT: Sorry it was a really clever joke.
I sincerely hope that was your attempt at sarcasm.
1 reply →
> CEOs are rich so they are successful.
"Successful" in which sense?
The most reasonable definition "Successful in convincing other people to give them money" is rather a tautology. :-)
A very related problem concerning your argument is well-known for decades: the Principal–agent problem:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
It says that the self-interest of an agent (e.g. the CEO) is not identical to the interests of the principal (e.g. the shareholders).
Why do I mention this? The CEO being rich is a measurement of the financial success of the agent, but not of the principal. You are rather interested in measuring the success of the principal.
As you might see in other comments the tautology is the joke.
About 2 decades ago, there were multiple studies showing that C-level execs who offshored work/production got 18% higher compensation. I'm sure that the same bizjournals are claiming that C-level execs that "embrace" AI are getting similar compensation premiums over anyone who takes a "wait and see" approach. The quantity of AI appearing in bizjournals reminds me of Paul Graham's essay on The Submarine.
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
We are since at least the 2000s when the world wide web revolution finally made it possible for Google, Apple, Amazon etc... to become the behemoths they are. And maybe even before that.
And the answer is no, because when chief officers succeed it's because of their genius and forward thinking posture, but when they fail it's none of their fault, so they are shielded in an echo chamber that produces such delusions and psychosis.
Way before that, as usual we can attribute quite a lot of stupidity in corporate governance to Jack Welch. Execs really bought into Welch's schtick wholly, they went to MBA schools praising Welch's management style, read his books, or at least got taught by people who had bought wholly into it.
So much time has passed that I believe truly the current crop of execs don't know any better, they think this status quo is the only way to manage companies. They aren't really wrong since the incentives are there, and they continue to reap rewards from doing it.
Agreed. For a long time Jack Welch was lauded as "The Greatest CEO in History" for burning GE to the ground in a way that made a lot of money (while destroying a company that took 100 years to build and employed 400,000 people).
By the time he died (pretty recently actually, 2020!), it was pretty obvious what kind of legacy he was leaving behind. Which is probably why his family was very careful to keep his burial location secret, presumably to keep people from peeing on his grave.
what a bizarre non sequitur
All we can really do is point and laugh. Boards don't listen to workers, and I bet most boards will be okay with a little spending oopsie-daisy because it was 'try shit and see if it works out'