The Era of the Business Idiot, Part 2

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2:34Better Offline. And you're on the second part of the Business Idiot trilogy. And indeed, that was a concept I introduced you to last episode. Think of the Business Idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of society. The business idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps getting promoted, and the CEO of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about artificial intelligence. They're the tenured professor that you wish would die, the administrator whose only job appears to be opening and closing their laptop, and the consultant that can come up with a million reasons to charge you more money, yet not one metric to judge their success by.

3:12Also, the marketing executive that's worked exactly three years at every major cloud player but does not appear to have done anything, and of course the investor that invests based on founders but really means guys that look and sound exactly like me. These people are present throughout the private and public sector and our governments too and they paradoxically do nothing of substance but somehow damage everything that they touch. This isn't to say our public and private sector is entirely useless just that these people have poisoned so many parts of our power structure that avoiding them is entirely impossible.

3:40Our economy is oriented around them made easier and more illogical for their benefit because their literal only goal in life has been to take and use power and help others who feel the same. The business idiot is also an authoritarian and will do whatever they need to, including harming the institution that they work for or those closest to them, like their co-workers or their community, as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility. Decades of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise because when you incentivize society to become management, to manage or run a company rather than do something for a reason or purpose, you're incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into whatever field the person goes into, be it public or private.

4:18Our society is in the thrall of dumb management and functions as such. Every government, the top quarter of every chart, features little Nero's who, instead of battling the fire engulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces strumming an off-key version of Wonderwall and the lyre and grumbling about how the firefighters need to work harder and maybe we could replace them with an LLM or a smart sprinkler system. Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arm's length, and effectively anything built at scale quickly becomes distance from both the customer and the laborer. This disconnection, or alienation better put, sits at the center of almost every problem I've ever talked about.

4:53Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their services, even though their customers don't like it and it doesn't really work? It's simple. They neither know or care what the customer wants. They barely know how their businesses function. They barely know what their products do and barely understand what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels magical because it does an impression of somebody doing an impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate way of describing how most executives and middle managers operate. But let me get a little more specific.

5:22An IBM study based on conversations with 2 ,000 global CEOs recently found that only 25 % of AI initiatives have delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years, and worse still, 64 % of the CEO surveyed acknowledged that the risks of falling behind drove their investments in some technologies before they had clear understanding of the value they brought to the organization. 50 % of respondents also found that the pace of recent investments has left their organizations with disconnected piecemeal technology. Almost as if they don't know what they're doing and they're just putting AI and stuff because it feels good or for no reason.

5:58Johnson & Johnson recently decided to shift from a broad generative AI experimentation to a focused approach on high value use cases, I quote from the Wall Street Journal, adding that only 10 to 15 % of use cases were driving about 80 % of the value. Pareto principle, MVP baby. Its last two CEOs, Alex Gorski and Joaquin Duato, both have MBAs, with current CEO Duato's previous 10 years at J &J being some sort of chairman or vice president, and the previous two CEOs were both pharmaceutical sales and marketing people. A fun fact about Bill Gorski. During his first tenure at Johnson & Johnson, he led marketing of products that deliberately underplayed some drug side effects and paid off the largest nursing home pharmacy in America to sell more drugs to old people.

6:42What a lovely man! The term executive loosely refers to a person who moves around numbers and hopes for the best. The modern executive does not lead. They prod. Their managers are hall monitors for organizations run predominantly by people that, by design, are entirely removed from the business itself, even in roles like marketing and sales, where CMOs and VPs bark orders without really participating in the process. We talk eagerly about how young people in entry-level jobs should earn their stripes by doing grunt work, and that too is the neoliberal poison in the veins of our society, because by definition, your very first experience of the workforce is working hard enough so that you don't have to work as hard, and you have to do the shit that nobody else wants to do.

7:23And anyway, the same managerial types who bitch about the entitlement and unrealistic expectations of young people are the same ones that are also eviscerating the bottom rung of the career ladder, typically by offshoring many of these roles or consolidating them in responsibilities of their increasingly burned out senior workers, or see AI as a way to eliminate what they see as an optional cost center and not the future of their workforce. I should also be clear with that. This is the big thing with AI and jobs right now that people are afraid of. these entry-level positions that are going to get, quote, automated out.

7:53I made a point in the last monologue that I want to clear up as well. I don't think AI will not take any jobs. I think it's taken jobs already, tons of freelancers, copy editors, art directors. People are really suffering. The point is, these people, the business idiots, they want you to believe that AI is going to take every job next year, or in three months, or very soon. It isn't clear how soon. They can't tell you. They don't understand. They're wrong. They need you to do this so that you start giving up, that you give up because you giving up gives them more power. If you believe they can replace you with AI that doesn't work or do your job, they will do so.

8:34Now, it may happen to you anyway. It may happen that they'll put an AI that can't do the shit that you do and replace you with probably contract labor. That's going to happen regardless of whether AI happens. Offshoring and contractor work have been eroding employment work for a long time. At will employment in America is a big fucking problem. It always has been. The way that labor is treated here is fucking insane. And a little comment as well for this episode. As I record this, the Vox union is yet to get an agreement with Vox. In the event that Vox does not give the deal in the next week, you're probably going to hear this when it's happening.

9:09I request that every single listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott every single Vox property, which sucks because The Verge has some great writers and also Neelai Patel. And you should boycott everything that Vox is doing right now based on this anyway, which sucks because they just hired some really excellent reporter called Hayden Field. She's excellent. The writers are the ones who are the victims here. The power structure of Vox is not giving them a fair deal. Solidarity with Vox. Do not fucking click their websites unless that deal gets done. Anyway, moving on. One of my favorite things that really fucking pissed me off was quiet quitting.

9:48It was something that they berated people for in 2022. And it's this ghastly euphemism for doing the job as specified in your employment agreement, because journalism is enthralled by the management class. And because the management class has so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what labor means that people got called lazy for doing their jobs. And this is because the middle manager brain doesn't see a worker as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as a kind of an asset that must provide a return. As a result, if another asset comes along that could potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or a theoretical AI agent, that middle manager won't hesitate to start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting rid of this annoying person who keeps doing the thing that the manager needs them to, but won't magically read the manager's mind and also keeps asking the manager all these annoying questions, just leave the manager alone to get paid.

10:40But really though, artificial intelligence is the ultimate panacea of the business idiot, a tool that gives an impression of productivity with far more production than the business idiot themselves, because they don't really do any work. The information reported recently that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, the chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of over$200 billion, by the way, despite the fact that like Salesforce, nobody really knows what they do, he chose to push AI across his entire organization, both in the product and in practice in the organization itself, based on the mental consideration I would usually associate with a raven finding a shiny object.

11:15The following is an actual quote from the article. When ChatGPT debuted in November 2020, McDermott joined his executives around a boardroom table, and they played with the chatbot together. From there, he made a quick decision. And this is a guy's voice. Bill's like, let me make it clear to everybody here. Everything you do. AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, records Sitzen, the ServiceNow Vice Chair. To begin a customer meeting on AI, McDermott has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to their best impression of him. Hi, I'm Bill McDermott. I'm a fucking idiot. Anyway, present AI not as a matter of bots or databases, but in grand sounding terms like business transformation.

11:53During the push to grow AI, McDermott has insisted his managers improve efficiency across their teams. He's laser focused on a sales team's participation rate. Let's assume you're a manager and you have 12 direct reports, he said. Now let's assume out of those 12, two people did good, which was so good that the manager was 110 % of plan. I don't think that's good. I tell the manager, what did the other 10 do? You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What do you mean efficiency? What does that quote even mean? 110 % of plan? What are you on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill?

12:25Do you have a gas leak in service now. I fucking swear these people make so much money, but when you hear them talk, they sound so stupid. They sound so very stupid. If you or I said stuff like that to someone, they'd check us for a concussion. But I'd wager that Mr. McDermott is concussion-free, and a true example of a business idiot, a person with incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on knowing things or caring about his customers, but on the latest shiny object that makes him think line go up. No, that's really Bill McDermott's thing. Back in 2022, he said to Yahoo Finance that the metaverse was real and that ServiceNow could help someone create an e-mall in the metaverse and have a futuristic storefront of some sort.

13:07One might wonder how ServiceNow provided that, and the answer is it did not provide that at all. I cannot find a single product that it's offered that includes anything of the sort. But like any of these CEOs, he doesn't really know stuff or do stuff. He just is, Descartes-ass motherfucker. The corporate equivalent of a stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it got there, but it hasn't been removed, and it's kind of difficult to get out without ripping the whole fucking thing up. The modern executive, like I have said, is symbolic, and the media has, due to a large amount of business idiots running these outlets and middle managers stuffed into the editorial class, been trained to never ask difficult questions, such as, what the fuck are you talking about, Bill?

13:45Or even the simple, what does that mean? Or how would you do that? Or I'm not sure I understand. Would you mind explaining? Perhaps the last part is the symptom of the overall problem, though. So many layers of editorial and managerial power are filled full of people that don't know anything, and there's never anyone crueler about ignorance than somebody who's ignorant themselves. We're still in many fields, journalism included, we're rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right, being right in the way that keeps the people with the keys from scraping them across our cars. We are, however, rewarded for saying the right thing at the right time, which more often than not means resembling our white male superiors speaking like our peers and delivering results in the way that makes them feel the happiest or the best about themselves.

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17:14listen to hot money agent of chaos on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts now a great example of our vibes based society was back in october 2021 where a washington post article written by two harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing a microsoft funded anti-remote work study and quoting an 130 year old economist called Alfred Marshall about how, and I quote, workers gather in dense clusters, ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist that they've written academic papers about him and also ignoring how excited he was about eugenics or the fact that he was writing about fucking factories.

17:59Remote work terrifies the business idiot because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to work, you know, stuff they've done. Office culture is inherently heteronormative and white and black women are less likely to be promoted by their managers. And continuing the existence of the office is all about making sure the business idiot continues reigning supreme. Removing the ability for the managerial whore monitors to look at you and try and work out what you're doing without ever really helping is a big part of being a manager.

18:29And if you're a manager hearing this and saying you don't do this, I challenge you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases. The business idiot does reign supreme. Their existence holds up every public company almost, and remote work was the first time they've willingly raised their heads and started honking angrily. Google demanded employees return to the office in 2021, but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand, because absolutely none of the decision-making was done with people that actually do work in mind. While we can, well, you can, I'm not interested, debate whether exclusively working remote is productive or not.

19:02The return to office push was almost entirely done in two ways. One, executives demanding people return to the office. Two, journalists asking executives if remote work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people that do the work and mostly not seeing if it was good and mostly just asking whether it was bad and how bad it was. Asking managers. This guy called Callum Borches of the Wall Street Journal, and he has written some real scorches, Borchers scorches, if you call them, by which I mean, I've never seen someone so interested in publishing what bosses think in my fucking life. And I run a PR firm.

19:39That should tell you everything. But the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many, many other outlets all fell for this crap because the business idiots have captured our media too, training even talented journalists to defer to power every term. When every power structure is stuffed full of do-nothing management types that have learned exactly as little as they need to get by, it's inevitable that journalism will cater to them. Specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful's ideas. Look at the coverage of AI, or the metaverse, or cryptocurrency, or Clubhouse.

20:06Look how willingly reporters will willingly accept narratives not based on practical experience or what the technology can do, but what the powerful and the popular are suddenly interested in. Every single tech bubble has followed the same path, and that path was paved with flawed, deferential, and specious journalism from small blogs to the biggest mastheads. Look at how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they ask things like Nilay Patel's hundred plus word questions to Sundar Pishai, or his interview with fucking Gary Vaynerchuk, the constant scam artist who has an NFT thing. Nilay, what the...

20:38Pardon me? Pardon me. Let me take this from the top. If you look at how reporters talk to executives, you should look not just at the way they ask things, but the things they accept them saying and the willingness they have to just accept what they're told. Satya Nadella is the CEO of a company with a market capitalization of over$3 trillion. That's Microsoft, by the way. And according to an interview mentioned in the last episode, uses AI to summarize podcast episodes and digest emails and effectively do all the obvious parts of his daily working life. I have no idea how you as a reporter do not say, Satya, what the fuck?

21:12You're outsourcing most of your life to generative AI. That's insane. Or even, do you actually do that? And then asking further questions. But that would get you in trouble. And the editorial class is the managerial class now and has spent decades mentoring young reporters and teaching them how not to ask questions, how not to push back, and to believe that a big, strong, powerful CEO would never mislead them. Kara Swisher's half-arsed interviews are considered daring and critical because journalism has, at large, lost its teeth, breeding reporters rewarded for knowing a little bit about a few things and punishing those who ask too many questions or refuse to fall in line.

21:47The reason that they don't want you to ask these questions is that the business idiot isn't big on answers. Editors that tell you to not push too hard at doing so because they know the executive won't have an answer, or they themselves don't know fucking anything. It isn't just about the PR person that trained them, but the fact that these men more often than not do not have a glancing understanding of their underlying business, or even the things they're saying. Yet in the same way that business idiots penetrated every other part of society, they eventually have found their way to journalism.

22:15While we can and should to scream at the disconnected idiots that ran vice into the ground. The problem is everywhere, because the business idiots aren't just at the top, but infecting the power structures underlying every newsroom. While there are some really great editors, there are plenty more that barely understand the articles they edit, the stories they commission, or that make reporters pull punches for fear of advertiser blowback, or worse still, just worried they'll get attacked on social media. Fucking cowards. Go hide under your table, you fucking coward. That and mentorship is dead across effectively all parts of society, meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learn by watching each other, which means they all make sure to not ask the rough questions and not push back too hard against the party or market or company messaging until everybody else is doing it.

23:00And under these conditions, business idiots thrive. The business idiot's reign is one of speciousness and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance and of theft. Mentoring people is something you do to pass on knowledge. It may make them grateful to you, but it ultimately, in the mind of a business idiot, creates a competitor or a rival. Investing in talent or worker conditions or even really work itself would require you to know what you're talking about or actually do work, which doesn't really make sense when you're talking to a worker who should be doing it for you. And they're the ones that are meant to work, right?

23:31You're there to manage them. Yet they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you want them to do, asking you to step in and help on something. And all of that's so and what? Ew. Oh, I'm a manager. I'm not here to non-sir. I'm a blogger. I'm not here to do work. Just know the stuff. Do the stuff. I have to go get lunch and then I have to go back out because I have another lunch. Okay? Enough. Oh my God. You want another thing? Why haven't you done the thing I didn't tell you yet? Anyway, I believe that this is the predominant mindset across most of the powerful to the point that everything in the world is constructed to reaffirm their beliefs rather than follow any kind of logical path.