I don’t think I buy this as a productive way of thinking about what happens in large organizations.
So first of all there’s a point made in the OP: the CEO is not, in fact, an expert on all the individual things the organization does. If I’m managing a team at Google whose job is to design a new datacentre and get it running, and I need to decide (say) how many servers of a particular kind to put in it, my mental simulation of Sundar Pichai says “why the hell are you asking me that? I don’t know anything about designing datacentres”.
OP deals with this by suggesting that we think about an “extended CEO” consisting of the CEO together with the people they trust to make more detailed decisions. Well, that probably consists of something like the CEO’s executive team, but none of them knows much about designing datacentres either.
For “simulate the (extended) CEO” to be an algorithm that gives useful answers, you need to think in terms of an “extended CEO” that extends all the way down to at most one of two levels of management above where a given decision is being made. Which means that the algorithm isn’t “simulate the CEO” any more, it’s “simulate someone one or two levels of management up from you”. Which is really just an eccentric way of saying “try to do what your managers want you to do, or would want if you asked them”.
And that is decent enough advice, but it’s also kinda obvious, and it doesn’t have the property that e.g. we might hope to get better results by training an AI model on the CEO’s emails and asking that to make the decisions. (I don’t think that would have much prospect of success anyway, until such time as the AIs are smart enough that we can just straightforwardly make them the CEO.)
I don’t think organizational principles like “don’t be evil” or “blessed are the meek” are most helpfully thought of as CEO-simulation assistance, either. “Don’t be evil” predates Sundar Pichai’s time as CEO. “Blessed are the meek” predates Pope Francis’s time as pope. It’s nearer to the mark to say that the CEOs are simulating the people who came up with those principles when they make their strategic decisions, or at least that they ought to. (Though I think Google dropped “don’t be evil” some time ago, and for any major religious institution there are plenty of reformers who would claim that it’s departed from its founding principles.)
I am pretty sure that most middle managers pretty much never ask themselves “what would the CEO do?”. Hopefully they ask “what would be best for the company?” and hopefully the CEO is asking that too, and to whatever extent they’re all good at figuring that out things will align. But not because anyone’s simulating anyone else.
(Probably people at or near the C-suite level do quite a bit of CEO-simulating, but not because it’s the best way to have the company run smoothly but because it’s good for their careers to be approved of by the CEO.)
Maybe I should clarify that I consider the “extended CEO” to essentially include everyone whose knowledge is of importance at the company. If you asked Sundar how many servers of a particular type to put in, he’d forward you to the relevant VP, who would forward you to the relevant director, who would forward you to the relevant principal engineer, who would actually answer your question. That’s what I mean by asking a question of the “extended CEO”.
A similar principle applies to simple rules like “don’t be evil” or “blessed be the meek”. Yes Sundar and Pope Francis didn’t create these principles, but, by taking over as CEO, they had to first show that their thinking was aligned with the principles of the existing “extended CEO” and those principles are summarized by simple lists like “ten things we know to be true” and the Beatitudes, so that other people are able to better simulate the opinion of “the extended CEO”.
When I was at Google, it was very common to resolve an internal disagreement by pointing to the answer that one of the “ten things we know to be true” principles would direct us to behave—and that allowed for internal consistency. Similarly, when I was a Christian, it was common to point to principles in the Beatitudes to resolve questions of what it meant to act in a moral way as a Christian.
Any Google CEO who doesn’t want to follow “ten things we know to be true” or any Pope who doesn’t want to follow the Beatitudes is going to need to do some heavy lifting to re-align their org around a different set of principles, or at the very least, signal strongly that those principles don’t currently apply.
If you consider the “extended CEO” to include everyone whose knowledge is of importance … surely you’re no longer talking about anything much like simulating a person in any useful sense? How does “simulate the CEO” describe the situation better than “try to do what’s best for the organization” or “follow the official policies and vision-statements of the organization”, for instance?
I think it’s telling that your examples say “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by referring to a foundational set of principles” and not “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by asking what the organization’s most senior person would do”. (Of course many Christians like to ask “what would Jesus do?” but I think that is importantly different from asking what the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Moderator of the General Assembly, etc., would do.)
I think most Googlers, and most Christians, are like you: they are much more likely to try to resolve a question by asking “what do the ‘ten things’ say?” or “how does this fit with the principles in the Sermon on the Mount[1]?” than by asking “what would Sundar Pichai say?” or “what would Pope Francis say?”. And I think those are quite different sorts of question, and when they give the same answer it’s much more “because the boss is following the principles” than “because the principles are an encoding of how the boss’s brain works”.
[1] I am guessing that you mean that rather than just the Beatitudes, which don’t offer that much in the way of practical guidance, and where they do there’s generally more detail in the rest of the SotM—e.g., maybe “blessed are the meek” tells you something about what to do, but not as much as the I-think-related “turn the other cheek” and “carry the load an extra mile” and so forth do.
(Disclaimer: I have never worked at Google; I was a pretty serious Christian for many years but have not been any sort of Christian for more than a decade.)
I don’t think I buy this as a productive way of thinking about what happens in large organizations.
So first of all there’s a point made in the OP: the CEO is not, in fact, an expert on all the individual things the organization does. If I’m managing a team at Google whose job is to design a new datacentre and get it running, and I need to decide (say) how many servers of a particular kind to put in it, my mental simulation of Sundar Pichai says “why the hell are you asking me that? I don’t know anything about designing datacentres”.
OP deals with this by suggesting that we think about an “extended CEO” consisting of the CEO together with the people they trust to make more detailed decisions. Well, that probably consists of something like the CEO’s executive team, but none of them knows much about designing datacentres either.
For “simulate the (extended) CEO” to be an algorithm that gives useful answers, you need to think in terms of an “extended CEO” that extends all the way down to at most one of two levels of management above where a given decision is being made. Which means that the algorithm isn’t “simulate the CEO” any more, it’s “simulate someone one or two levels of management up from you”. Which is really just an eccentric way of saying “try to do what your managers want you to do, or would want if you asked them”.
And that is decent enough advice, but it’s also kinda obvious, and it doesn’t have the property that e.g. we might hope to get better results by training an AI model on the CEO’s emails and asking that to make the decisions. (I don’t think that would have much prospect of success anyway, until such time as the AIs are smart enough that we can just straightforwardly make them the CEO.)
I don’t think organizational principles like “don’t be evil” or “blessed are the meek” are most helpfully thought of as CEO-simulation assistance, either. “Don’t be evil” predates Sundar Pichai’s time as CEO. “Blessed are the meek” predates Pope Francis’s time as pope. It’s nearer to the mark to say that the CEOs are simulating the people who came up with those principles when they make their strategic decisions, or at least that they ought to. (Though I think Google dropped “don’t be evil” some time ago, and for any major religious institution there are plenty of reformers who would claim that it’s departed from its founding principles.)
I am pretty sure that most middle managers pretty much never ask themselves “what would the CEO do?”. Hopefully they ask “what would be best for the company?” and hopefully the CEO is asking that too, and to whatever extent they’re all good at figuring that out things will align. But not because anyone’s simulating anyone else.
(Probably people at or near the C-suite level do quite a bit of CEO-simulating, but not because it’s the best way to have the company run smoothly but because it’s good for their careers to be approved of by the CEO.)
Maybe I should clarify that I consider the “extended CEO” to essentially include everyone whose knowledge is of importance at the company. If you asked Sundar how many servers of a particular type to put in, he’d forward you to the relevant VP, who would forward you to the relevant director, who would forward you to the relevant principal engineer, who would actually answer your question. That’s what I mean by asking a question of the “extended CEO”.
A similar principle applies to simple rules like “don’t be evil” or “blessed be the meek”. Yes Sundar and Pope Francis didn’t create these principles, but, by taking over as CEO, they had to first show that their thinking was aligned with the principles of the existing “extended CEO” and those principles are summarized by simple lists like “ten things we know to be true” and the Beatitudes, so that other people are able to better simulate the opinion of “the extended CEO”.
When I was at Google, it was very common to resolve an internal disagreement by pointing to the answer that one of the “ten things we know to be true” principles would direct us to behave—and that allowed for internal consistency. Similarly, when I was a Christian, it was common to point to principles in the Beatitudes to resolve questions of what it meant to act in a moral way as a Christian.
Any Google CEO who doesn’t want to follow “ten things we know to be true” or any Pope who doesn’t want to follow the Beatitudes is going to need to do some heavy lifting to re-align their org around a different set of principles, or at the very least, signal strongly that those principles don’t currently apply.
If you consider the “extended CEO” to include everyone whose knowledge is of importance … surely you’re no longer talking about anything much like simulating a person in any useful sense? How does “simulate the CEO” describe the situation better than “try to do what’s best for the organization” or “follow the official policies and vision-statements of the organization”, for instance?
I think it’s telling that your examples say “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by referring to a foundational set of principles” and not “when I was in organization X we would try to make decisions by asking what the organization’s most senior person would do”. (Of course many Christians like to ask “what would Jesus do?” but I think that is importantly different from asking what the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Moderator of the General Assembly, etc., would do.)
I think most Googlers, and most Christians, are like you: they are much more likely to try to resolve a question by asking “what do the ‘ten things’ say?” or “how does this fit with the principles in the Sermon on the Mount[1]?” than by asking “what would Sundar Pichai say?” or “what would Pope Francis say?”. And I think those are quite different sorts of question, and when they give the same answer it’s much more “because the boss is following the principles” than “because the principles are an encoding of how the boss’s brain works”.
[1] I am guessing that you mean that rather than just the Beatitudes, which don’t offer that much in the way of practical guidance, and where they do there’s generally more detail in the rest of the SotM—e.g., maybe “blessed are the meek” tells you something about what to do, but not as much as the I-think-related “turn the other cheek” and “carry the load an extra mile” and so forth do.
(Disclaimer: I have never worked at Google; I was a pretty serious Christian for many years but have not been any sort of Christian for more than a decade.)