To understand the issue, I went back to a book published in 1954, 20 years before I was born: Peter Drucker’s “The Practice of Management.” Drucker explores the different roles inside every business, which I would categorize as builders, sellers and measurers.
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Measurers are also critical to a business, but different from the other two. The best are hard to find. They work tirelessly behind the scenes, don’t seek the recognition of a front-of-house role, and ideally have a perspective independent from the rest of the organization. Drucker argues that measuring business is important, but customers are earned through building and selling. The best businesses would maximize investment in those two functions.
AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.
It’s surprising how typical, how mundane, the logic errors CEOs make are. This guy read a book that he admits was released (presumably he means as a signal of its timelessness) 20 years before he was born. It collapses everyone into three groups. He assumes this heuristic is both correct and accurate to modern times, simply because the words have meanings that attach to modern concepts.
But builders in 1954 were making widgets and physical objects. Sellers were often in a store talking to customers who wanted to buy that object. Measurers were bean-counters, barely out of slide-rule days.
All of these types of roles have updated and transformed to the point of being totally different, and now - like with Cloudflare - the main product is information (code and knowledge, packaged as Cloudflare’s site products). Builders, sellers and measurers all just interact with that information in different ways. Each one has different efficiencies and value.
And here at least, assuming that AI is going to capture “measurers” more than others is not a smart CEO’s inspired leadership. It is a symptom of a brain that can’t adapt to the modern era.
Indeed, why would he not assume that the “builders” will be replaced more easily, as most other big tech CEOs think? Isn’t Claude Code the one success story in a sea of AI losses in the billions? Presumably his product can’t infinitely scale, so why would he keep hiring into infinity? (Those assumptions supporting firing “builders” are wrong, of course, but are as valid as his wrong assumption.)
Why would he not assume the “sellers” can be replaced - their entire job is chatting and collating information tailored to prompts as an intermediary, which is the entire purpose of LLMs? (Again, I don’t think they can be replaced, but again, it’s equally wrong in the ways he is wrong.)
The problem, as always, is that CEOs never understand exactly what is happening on the ground. They need these heuristics to give themselves confidence that they understand the whole picture. The problem is at some point, they lose their humility, their connection to the people who are doing the work, enough to care. If Prince cared enough to think harder about what these “measurers” real value is, and what AI’s real competency is, 20% of the workforce might still have a job.
It’s surprising how typical, how mundane, the logic errors CEOs make are. This guy read a book that he admits was released (presumably he means as a signal of its timelessness) 20 years before he was born. It collapses everyone into three groups. He assumes this heuristic is both correct and accurate to modern times, simply because the words have meanings that attach to modern concepts.
But builders in 1954 were making widgets and physical objects. Sellers were often in a store talking to customers who wanted to buy that object. Measurers were bean-counters, barely out of slide-rule days.
All of these types of roles have updated and transformed to the point of being totally different, and now - like with Cloudflare - the main product is information (code and knowledge, packaged as Cloudflare’s site products). Builders, sellers and measurers all just interact with that information in different ways. Each one has different efficiencies and value.
And here at least, assuming that AI is going to capture “measurers” more than others is not a smart CEO’s inspired leadership. It is a symptom of a brain that can’t adapt to the modern era.
Indeed, why would he not assume that the “builders” will be replaced more easily, as most other big tech CEOs think? Isn’t Claude Code the one success story in a sea of AI losses in the billions? Presumably his product can’t infinitely scale, so why would he keep hiring into infinity? (Those assumptions supporting firing “builders” are wrong, of course, but are as valid as his wrong assumption.)
Why would he not assume the “sellers” can be replaced - their entire job is chatting and collating information tailored to prompts as an intermediary, which is the entire purpose of LLMs? (Again, I don’t think they can be replaced, but again, it’s equally wrong in the ways he is wrong.)
The problem, as always, is that CEOs never understand exactly what is happening on the ground. They need these heuristics to give themselves confidence that they understand the whole picture. The problem is at some point, they lose their humility, their connection to the people who are doing the work, enough to care. If Prince cared enough to think harder about what these “measurers” real value is, and what AI’s real competency is, 20% of the workforce might still have a job.