#MANAGEMENT

The Dot and the Swarm - Ethan Mollick

As somebody who teaches managers and has published research on management, I guess I believed that managing agents would be different. Humans have been working on management for a very long time without fully figuring it out. It seemed like the kind of thing that would need to be designed by people, at least for a while. It turns out that organizing work is just one more thing AI can learn to do.

This is the Bitter Lesson applied to the org chart. The organizational problem I thought would take years of careful human design was largely solved by models that are better at organizing.

A lot of what we call management exists to solve problems that come from organizations being made of people. People have their own goals, and those aren’t always the goals of organizations. We call this the principal-agent problem and a lot of the machinery of organizations, from bonuses to management structures, is based around solving it.

Management as AI superpower - Ethan Mollick

When you look at what actually goes into good delegation documentation, it’s remarkably consistent: What are we trying to accomplish, and why? Where are the limits of the delegated authority? What does “done” look like? What specific outputs do I need? What interim outputs do I need to follow your progress? And what should you check before telling me you’re finished? If these are well-specified, the AI, like humans, is far more likely to do a good job.

And in figuring out how to give these instructions to the AI, it turns out you are basically reinventing management.

I find it interesting to watch as some of the most well-known software developers at the major AI labs note how their jobs are changing from mostly programming to mostly management of AI agents.