When people defend CEO pay, they often argue that business leaders like Steve Jobs deserve every cent they get, without mentioning how these are the most extreme outliers. There are also CEOs like probable Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who did a really cruddy job running Hewlett-Packard, collected a monumental golden parachute when she was fired and was safely out the door when thousands of employees lost their jobs. Okay, maybe she’s an outlier also, but your average company leader isn’t an innovator (that word) but a steward. They’re very overpaid.

Automation has allowed many of these corporate titans to reduce staff over the past decade and the practice will likely continue apace, but that blade has two edges, and the received wisdom of the importance of the CEO will likely be threatened by technology as well. 

From Devin Fidler at Harvard Business Review:

For the last several years, we have been studying the forces now shaping the future of work, and wondering whether high-level management could be automated. This inspired us to create prototype software we informally dubbed “iCEO.” As the name suggests, iCEO is a virtual management system that automates complex work by dividing it into small individual tasks. iCEO then assigns these micro-tasks to workers using multiple software platforms, such as oDesk, Uber, and email/text messaging. Basically, the system allows a user to drag-and-drop “virtual assembly lines” into place, and run them from a dashboard.

But could iCEO manage actual work projects for our organization? After a few practice runs, we were ready to find out. For one task, we programmed iCEO to oversee the preparation of a 124-page research report for a prestigious client (a Fortune 50 company). We spent a few hours plugging in the parameters of the project, i.e. structuring the flow of tasks, then hit play. For instance, to create an in-depth assessment of how graphene is produced, iCEO asked workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to curate a list of articles on the topic. After duplicates were removed, the list of articles was passed on to a pool of technical analysts from oDesk, who extracted and arranged the articles’ key insights. A cohort of Elance writers then turned these into coherent text, which went to another pool of subject matter experts for review, passing them on to a sequence of oDesk editors, proofreaders, and fact checkers.

iCEO routed tasks across 23 people from around the world, including the creation of 60 images and graphs, followed by formatting and preparation. We stood back and watched iCEO execute this project. We rarely needed to intervene, even to check the quality of individual components of the report as they were submitted to iCEO, or spend time hiring staff, because QA and HR were also automated by iCEO. (The hiring of oDesk contractors for this project, for example, was itself an oDesk assignment.)

We were amazed by the quality of the end result — and the speed with which it was produced.•