HBR — Survey: 68% of CEOs Admit They Weren’t Prepared for the Job

CEOs are known for their confidence. It is, after all, one of the reasons they’ve made it to the top. And yet, that confidence sometimes flags, as we at leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder learned from a survey of 402 CEOs from 11 countries—executives who together run companies with $2.6 trillion in sales.

Participating anonymously, CEOs told us that while they did feel ready for the strategic and business aspects of their roles, they felt much less prepared for the personal and interpersonal components of leadership, which are just as critical to success.
Here are some of the most surprising findings:

One of the issues is that there is not much CEO training prior to taking the reins.

Remarked one: “When you become the final decisionmaker, everything changes. It’s hard to train on this.”

That would apply to decision-makings in politics, too. How does one train to be president and commander-in chief of the military.

Harvard Business Review
Survey: 68% of CEOs Admit They Weren’t Prepared for the Job
Kati Najipoor-Schutte and Dick Patton

Missy Cummings — We need to overcome AI's inherent human bias

Like I've been saying. GIGO.

This is somewhat similar to the systems/game theoretical approach to military strategy that was highly popular with strategists affecting policy at the time of the Vietnam War.

World Economic Forum
We need to overcome AI's inherent human bias

Missy Cummings | Director, Humans & Autonomy Laboratory

See also

Justifiably, there is a growing debate on the ethics of AI use. How do we roll out AI-based systems that cannot reason about some of the ethical conundrums that human decision-makers need to weigh – issues such as the value of a life and ending deep-seated biases against under-privileged groups? Some even propose halting the rollout of AI before we have answered these tough questions.

I would argue that it’s not acceptable to reject today’s AI due to perceived ethical issues. Why? Ironically, I believe it might be unethical to do so.

Greater good

At its core, there is a “meta ethics” issue here.

How can we advocate halting the deployment of a technology solely because of a small chance of failure, when we know that AI technologies harnessed today could definitely save millions of people?

The basis of utilitarian consequential ethics is "utility." "Good" is defined in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Deontological ethics is rule-based. Kantian deontological ethics is based on the rule of making decisions based on whether the action can be generalized as principle, which is a philosophical way of stating the Golden Rule.

Virtue ethics is based on a constellation of virtues that do not necessarily align. Practical wisdom must be applied as the criterion of reason.

Moral sentiments theories like those of David Hume and Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments are based on a moral sensibility or refined feeling.

Situational ethics denies a universal approach to ethical decision-making in that every case is a special case and needs to be approached as such.

Situational ethics, or situation ethics, takes into account the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it according to absolute moral standards. In situation ethics, within each context, it is not a universal law that is to be followed, but the law of love. A Greek word used to describe love in the Bible is "agape". Agape is the type of love that shows concern about others, caring for them as much as one cares for oneself. Agape love is conceived as having no strings attached to it and seeking nothing in return; it is a totally unconditional love. Proponents of situational approaches to ethics include Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Jaspers, and Heidegger.

Specifically Christian forms of situational ethics placing love above all particular principles or rules were proposed in the first half of the twentieth century by Rudolf Bultmann, John A. T. Robinson, and Joseph Fletcher. These theologians point specifically to agapē, or unconditional love, as the highest end. Other theologians who advocated situational ethics include Josef Fuchs, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich.  Tillich, for example, declared that "Love is the ultimate law."

Fletcher, who became prominently associated with this approach in the English-speaking world due to his book (Situation Ethics), stated that "all laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms, are only contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love" in the particular situation, and thus may be broken or ignored if another course of action would achieve a more loving outcome. Fletcher has sometimes been identified as the founder of situation ethics, but he himself refers his readers to the active debate over the theme that preceded his own work.

Perennial Wisdom is in agreement with "the law of love" as supreme while also emphasizing that there are categories of mutual upholding, such that different conditions result in different responsibilities independently of specific contexts and circumstances. For example, parents responsibility is to provide first for their own families; citizens responsibility is first to their own countries.

Ethical dilemmas should not halt the rollout of AI. Here’s why

Kartik Hosanagar | Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Ian Welsh' — Review of “Descartes' Error” by Antonio Damasio

Short summary of the main thrust of cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio's work about the interplay of reason and feeling.

Ian Welsh's blog

Review of “Descartes' Error” by Antonio Damasio
Ian Welsh

See also

YouTube

Antonio Damasio: INET Keynote Address entitled Human Decisions

Chris Dillow — Knowledge vs rationality

Stumbling and Mumbling
Knowledge vs rationality
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Scott Adams — Experience is Overrated

Most educated people could make informed decisions about most political questions if they had the benefit of world-class advisors. That’s my claim.

But how about international trade agreements, tax policy, and healthcare? Those are complicated, right? Yes. Indeed, no president understands those topics in sufficient detail to be trusted with a solo decision. So in those cases, you need advisors. That brings us to the question of how you can find the right advisors.

Easy.

If it’s a military question, you ask the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get you the right advisors for the topic.

If you have a law-and-order question, ask someone like Rudy Giuliani to come up with some suggested advisors. Giuliani could give you ten names from both parties.

If you need experts in economics, ask your Chief of Staff to round up a few top economists (Nobel winners, for example) from both parties and see if they all say the same thing. They won’t. So in that field, there is no such thing as useful expert advice.

And so on. The point is that it is easy for a President of the United States to assign people to find the best advisors. The President isn’t making phone calls and interviewing experts all day. The President sees the experts who have already been vetted by several other experts.

Technocracy as democracy.

Scott Adams' Blog
Experience is Overrated
Scott Adams

HBR — You Can’t Make Good Predictions Without Embracing Uncertainty

But the uncertainty of the future is no excuse for less rigor or clarity. A consistent, quantitative perspective on uncertainty not only builds the best foundation for making good management decisions but also provides a platform for developing a shared understanding of trade-offs, bridging disagreement and establishing accountability.…

Uncertainty cannot be pretended away.

Harvard Business Review
You Can’t Make Good Predictions Without Embracing Uncertainty
Peter Hopper, partner and managing director of the Hong Kong office of the Strategic Decisions Group, and Carl Spetzler, chairman and CEO of SDG and coauthor

Ohio State University — You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic

Researchers explain human decision-making with physics theory…

"Whenever something comes up that isn't consistent with classical theories, we often label it as 'irrational.' But from the perspective of quantum cognition, some findings aren't irrational anymore. They're consistent with quantum theory--and with how people really behave."

In two new review papers in academic journals, Wang and her colleagues spell out their new theoretical approach to psychology. One paper appears in Current Directions in Psychological Science, and the other in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Their work suggests that thinking in a quantum-like way¬--essentially not following a conventional approach based on classical probability theory--enables humans to make important decisions in the face of uncertainty, and lets us confront complex questions despite our limited mental resources.

What was that about rational choice again?

Eureka Alert
You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic
Ohio State University

ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Daniel Little — Science and decision

Science is uncertain•; and yet we have no better basis for making important decisions about the future than the best scientific knowledge currently available. Moreover, there are powerful economic interests that exert themselves to undermine the confidence of the public and our policy makers in the findings of science that appear to harm those interests. How should we think about these two factors, one epistemic and the other political? The first lays out the reasons for thinking that some of our most confident theories may in fact be erroneous; the second makes us worry that even strongly credible science will be undermined by corporate and financial interests....

Understanding Society
Science and decision
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Science is uncertain in several respects. First, science knowledge is uncertain in the sense of being tentative. Science involves general description, which can be falsified but not definitively confirmed. Secondly, since science is empirical it can only approach probability 1 as a limit. Science is essentially skeptical. Thirdly, no theoretical explanation can be shown to be the "best" explanation possible, only the optimal one available at the time.

This relates to the raging discussion that Paul Romer began with his post on "mathiness." It's still raging.

We Need Public Trust (And Scalable Verification Methods), Not Just Public Institutions

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




In ongoing discussion with friends at the Public Banking Institute, we often return to a state of talking past one another.

It's obviously my fault. Trying to think ahead always seems to come across as opposition - especially if articulated clumsily. At least initially.

Guess I really do need more practice at saying "Yes, And" instead of "No, But."

It's not enough to think .... one needs to constantly PRACTICE all the arbitrary hand-shaking protocols too, just to effectively communicate with all parts of your own, diversifying electorate.

Does the following help?

Some of my PBI friends (not all) get so involved in local projects that they tend to forget about the implications of national policy.

I am NOT dismissing anything about Public Banking. In fact, I couldn't agree more. There should be many more Public Banks, at every level. Nationalize TBTJ mega-banks. "State-alize" many regional banks, and "County-ize" & "City-ize" many local banks. It's necessary.

That still won't be enough to restore our cultural agility. Not now, and not ever.

I am trying to think ahead, and consider why Public Banking will always be necessary but not sufficient. There are further issues that must be included in the mix. That's why I keep bringing up the "3i's" of contingency management.

Impact;
In-Flight;
Instigators.
...If you don't address all 3, simultaneously, you can't win (excepting luck).

That advice applies not just to current frictions, but also to our own future actions, and selves.

So one obvious implication sticks in my mind. No amount of practice at local tactics (or regional strategy) replaces interleaved attention to national policy. That's just common sense. The inverse is also true, of course. We need both, not either in isolation.

You cannot tell from the presence of public banks alone whether a public is ceding national policy space to NeoLiberal ideologues.

The archetypical Public Bank, the state Bank of North Dakota has had zero impact opposing the slow return of NeoLiberal national fiscal policy the past 80 years. There's no evidence that they even tried!

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve, for example, is a Public Bank. Heck, Congress is a Public Institution too. 

None of that means that any public institution is immune to being co-opted by Control Frauds. 

Foxes will always seek to be appointed to head local, regional and national Hen Houses. Our need isn't just for more hen houses - which we always need. We ALSO need continuously evolving methods for keeping our own foxes under control.

Plus, those new methods must be more scalable than previous and current methods.

So I'm always thinking of ways to have our public banks AND our national policy too. To me, that's the minimal challenge worth pursuing. Otherwise, you're saying "No class war or Control Frauds in local politics, but they are ok in national government." Lots of luck with that approach.

That is not setting our sights high enough.

The root issue is trust (AND to verify).

If we can't trust private enterprise to run all banks, what can we trust private enterprise to run? Garbage collection? Police Departments? Our MICC?

If we want institutions we can trust, regulate the damn industries!

The root solution is regulatory methods.

What we really want is evolving methods for maintaining Public Regulation ... of all industry sectors, and all components, private or public. That timeless logic is the only way I see how to tackle our exponentially rising organizational tasks.

"More is Different" - it sure is. So how do growing human populations manage more of themselves?

By always bridging FROM current-scale methods TO our emerging, larger-scale behaviors, with NEW METHODS ... that's how. In plain words, that means by ALWAYS thinking ahead, and NOT just on what we're already working on today.

Every 50 years or less, we have a wholly new scale of organizational issues. Issues that today's methods and institutions won't adequately address.

How will we regulate all our emerging, scale-dependent activities?

Not by micromanaging every discipline, but by instilling subtle, new methods allowing us to continuously regulate distributed TRUST, and thereby cultural resiliency. The key issue is to constantly improve the quality (including tempo) of decision-making that is always increasingly distributed.

We can't do that by scaling up committees, or micromanaging existing processes.

Take the ancient example of siRNA allowing micro-regulation of massively larger genomes, and thereby eventually enabling massively multi-cellular species, eventually called Eukaryotes (e.g., humans). We couldn't have evolved just by having more "public" proteins. That's like expecting to put enough police cars on the streets to enforce all traffic laws. That approach - regulating self with more self - just won't scale.

Similarly, stages of larger-scale human culture were possible only after invention of language, writing and other miniaturized, "scalable" technologies.

Again. Self-regulation of more self, by micro-management WITH more self, just doesn't scale.

Replacing self-regulation with ingenious micro-regulation technology allows us to have our "more" and organize it too. All we need from our growing population is their feedback, not distributed-regulation with their actual selves.

Take the same principle applied to Blue Collar policing. The breakthrough method for retaining trust in police is public verification, i.e., not only adding more layers of "Public Policing" but adding miniature lapel-cameras to every cop on the beat.

Face it. We'll never trust enough of our accountants and bankers - public or private - until they wear lapel-cameras too, or something analogous.

What we're doing now is never enough, because there'll be more of everything tomorrow, and more is always different, because interdependencies that are insignificant at one scale eventually become significant - or overwhelming - at another scale.

Ancient cathedral builders learned that, the hard way. So do all people in all professions, ... but never fast enough.

Achieving Public Regulation comes down to inventing subtle new methods for monitoring key portions of increasingly distributed decision-making, so that we can maintain alignment across our growing electorate, and retain trust in ourselves.

There are always more insanely great things our aggregate can achieve .. but only if we invent ways to trust and verify the aggregate utility of our own, distributed actions.

Or regulate.

The Depth of Interdependencies Which Have an Effect on "Economics"

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

If you read the following article, it's hard not to appreciate the cascade of events and policy decisions which can alter the economics of the outcome state.

A Canadian Looks At Decision-Making In American Policy Outcomes

If we make enough elected officials exempt from enough things .... then anything is possible, right? Even on Wall St.

If we imagine going even a little way further down that path, we can then easily imagine a situation when overt preparations for and outright practice of even the most heinous of crimes, physical or financial, are not technically illegal. Right?

So group success tracks the quality of ALL prior decision-making? Where have we heard that before? Evolution as the sum of all Adaptive Rates? No wonder current NRA leadership is hiding some of it's narrow-minded excesses behind the excuse of religion. It's not even easy to discover who NRA leaders are, except through critics of the NRA, so alternate views of NRA leaders are offered here.

It's always time to consider how and when and why we should be actively shedding maladaptive habits, as well as searching for the rare, new cultural tools that actually improve, not just complicate, our cultural adaptive rate. When considering the economics of a group adaptive race, shedding burdensome habits and policies is usually more important than adding new ones, just like shedding unnecessary weight from a race car is more productive than adding more engine power.

That immediately brings up the question of group-wide assessment methods. Without adequate assessment methods, how will we - as a culture - ever know if we're making progress ... or regressing? The quality of our distributed decision-making obviously tracks our ability to gather a NET assessment of the sum of our distributed outcomes.

At this point you may be wondering how measures as diverse as GDP, childhood deaths, mental health costs, interest rates, security costs, fiscal spending and net policy development all intertwine.  Good!

Is the return on coordinating all those things discussed by economists? If not, how do you quickly explain return-on-coordination to our legions of under-prepared politicians and policy staff?  It's obvious that no one person can answer that question adequately. It takes a nation to raise and select a productive policy office holder.

What else can we add to this discussion of policy interdependencies? Maybe the observation that group success and survival is not purely about our distributed methods and distributed rights? And that adaptive policy development is obviously also about how we collectively use those methods and right.  Do we use them in ways that make as a nation greater than the sum of it's parts, or as a disorganized mob? Answering that question also takes a nation.

Where can we start? Everywhere, of course. Here's just one of many places to start. Are all members of the NRA our enemies? Or is it just a question of - quickly - bringing them into our NET assessment methods? Can all citizens reach consensus on desired-outcomes? If so, adaptive usage patterns for all our methods and rights will fall into place. If not, we're already on the path to civil war. Chew on those economics.

Douglas T Kenrick — Cruzonomics: The Problem of Free Market Psychology

How people actually choose and make decisions — not the way conventional economists and market fundamentalists assume, or game theorists.

Truthout | News Analysis

Cruzonomics: The Problem of Free Market Psychology
Douglas T Kenrick, Psychology Today