A Squire, in other words. Someone who travels with his knight, enables him to be a knight, and who quite literally has his/her back in battle. Eventually a squire often became a knight, but the role itself was vital to Chivalry.
I agree with you completely. I thought it was a terrible idea to have the office executives and professionals schedule their own travel, keep their own calendar, do those time sheets, etc. Most of us made north of $200 per hour and we’re not all that proficient at clerical tasks, let alone keeping the office organized.
Something Interesting about secretaries -- throughout most of the 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a real estate investment company. There were around a dozen senior vice presidents and they all had executive secretaries. These women, and they were all women, functioned as a sort of major domo and besides supervising clerical staff their most important characteristic was to know how to keep tneir mouth shut. They had access to information that they did not share.
The majordomo metaphor was perfect. Women don’t have the loose lips (braggart) characteristics of men in the workplace, in my experience. I had confidence in the talents of confidentiality of female coworkers.
This sounds as if you are describing a family office manager, albeit for the lower end. If ChatGPT is as revolutionary as is commonly alleged, I would expect these job duties to be instantiated in AI tooling. So I guess I don't really see this as a compelling vision for the "future of work" or how that topic intersects with ChatGPT.
“The secretary as confidential advisor has never had a place on organizational charts.” Hamilton was Washington’s Secretary to the President, considered the most powerful job other than president. Washington recognized genius and gave Hamilton tremendous latitude to design and implement the U.S. financial system, currency, etc. Hamilton was America’s greatest pirate, smuggling into the U.S. textile machinery and British tradesmen who knew how to assemble and run this technology, a technology which kick-started the U.S. Industrial Revolution. Reminds one of today’s China, no? Trivial fact: My mother served as a secretary to FDR during WWII. One of her responsibilities was managing his birthday correspondence. (“Hey, Mom! Throw Stalin’s birthday card in the circular file!”)
I agree, saving an expensive executive time and helping them get more done is a valuable role. In many cases, as Andrew mentions, this seems to have morphed into a chief of staff, which is higher powered and less tainted as a term these days. Apart from the largest companies, there aren't very many people making $1.5M a year.
Having said that, I'm not sure dictation, a human fielding AI spam, or the idea of your average assistant being on the Michael Ovitz track are very convincing.
When I was in middle management recently, I had part of an assistant's time. They were very helpful in filing time-consuming expense reports, organizing offsites, and unblocking difficult calendar changes. I still preferred to book my own travel and whatnot, and I never used them as a confidant or filer. So, a useful role, but not exactly a great career or a game changer.
The post rings more true at the CEO level, where every moment of time you can save with an assistant and/or chief of staff is probably worth it.
What I like about this guest post is that it shows the dignity in work, and the dignity of work, in the occupations that don't command fame or high status.
By the time I entered the workforce, there was no steno pool and what was a secretary was now the office manager. Instead of reporting to an executive or high-level manager, the office manager had to report to the entire floor. The pay stayed the same, and the manager title didn't come with any budgetary or hire/fire powers. The secretary was now a den mother, tasked with helping a hundred or more people with thousands of little tasklets.
This takes tremendous energy and physical and mental stamina to keep an office running. These roles ought to be dignified, and compensated accordingly.
This position, call it secretary if you want, is a great idea, but it will never happen. Contemporary organizations just don’t think that way. That’s why you can’t get a human being when you phone your bank, cable company, nor primary care doctor. Somehow they think that three options accessed by pressing buttons is all it takes to meet your needs. The million and a half CEO got to be a CEO by axing employees not hiring more. That’s our culture. This posting is a warm just so story; it will never be true.
Executive Assistants are still widely common in industry... they just have been gutted at the middle Managment layer. Most C-level execs and EVP/SVP kind of roles have them depending upon the company. The amount of wasteful spending at companies is incredible. There is plenty of penny pinching at the same time as splurges. There is much less rational planning of these things than many people expect.
Investors are usually smart enough to seek profitable (high-margin) growth. In booms sometimes chasing the top-line causes low margin behavior that then gets attention whenever there is market volatility. Top line growth can hide a bunch bad practices, but also good ideas that just were too ambitious in hindsight for the emerging market conditions
I find this discussion amusingly retro. An assumption is being made that executive tasks will remain hierarchical in the new world of AI. Actually, I predict that the role of overseer may be in more in jeopardy than at of his/her assistant.
The job of the executive is to do what AI does much more effectively which is to sift through data and information and to determine the most optimal action to be 'executed.' We are already seeing CEO's in hoodies and jeans running mega corporations. The need for old style aristocratic protocol is gone and what an executive does now is very pragmatic - easily co-opted by a cheaper and more efficient AI program. We used to challenge computers to chess matches, now we challenge them to directing major corporations or governments.
It is quaint to believe that the old aristocratic hierarchy would survive such a tsunami of technological change. Perhaps this will usher in a new Renaissance with humans finding more humane things to do than sift data staring at computer screens? The possibilities here are enormous and wildly destructive to the status quo. We need to think much more broadly as to the role of humans in the world we're creating.
My experience is that the job of the executive is talk out of both sides of their mouth, assess the politics of the office in terms of what can be done, what should be done and in whose interest it should be done. Any IT solution will provide IT blabber mouths with access to confidential information
Machine learning is here. It's going to make some jobs obsolete. It's going to create other jobs. It's going to be disruptive. And it's likely going to materially improve the vast majority of people's lives. It's great to see a piece that accepts that reality and addresses how to change with it instead of lamenting it.
The industrial revolution greatly reduced the role of physical strength in most occupations, thus allowing physically weaker people (men and women) to compete. Success became somewhat decoupled from brawn.
Who will the machine learning revolution benefit? If history is a guide, it may allow the intellectually weaker to compete (again). And we ought to welcome that! Machine learning may provide an alternative to the world Vonnegut hypothesized in his great book Player Piano. Maybe success can become somewhat decoupled from brain too.
It would elevate human characteristics that AI would have trouble replicating. I was going to say empathy but physical touch and other physical aspects/interactions, probably.
That leaves us humans with a pretty small area of expertise. I hope we're useful for something more than that.
What would a society in which essentially all human needs can be met without human labor actually look like? Marx suggests an optimistic outcome, but I can't get the "people" from the movie Wall-E out of my head.
Have we already forgotten that _more than four years ago_, Google was showing off a "voice assistant" tool that does a pretty good job at making appointments for you? What do you want to bet it's only gotten better? They're just keeping it under wraps because they need to figure out how to roll it out again without having people freak out.
(Actually I believe the feature he talks about in that same segment of the keynote, about having the hours displayed in Google search results get updated based on a call to the business, _has_ rolled out across the US, and is now used quite widely. If you have a small business indexed by Google, the system will call you to check about updated holiday hours.)
Seems to me once you‘ve trained these incredibly efficient and seemingly perfect secretaries the best thing to do is hire several of them and get rid of the 1.5 million dollar executive, who doesn’t seem to be very competent or adding any real value, except in his own mind. Go a long way to address inequality.
Well said. Isn’t the modern version of the trusted apprentice/advisor a “chief of staff”?
I had the same reaction. Chief of staff or bag rat. 😄
A Squire, in other words. Someone who travels with his knight, enables him to be a knight, and who quite literally has his/her back in battle. Eventually a squire often became a knight, but the role itself was vital to Chivalry.
I agree with you completely. I thought it was a terrible idea to have the office executives and professionals schedule their own travel, keep their own calendar, do those time sheets, etc. Most of us made north of $200 per hour and we’re not all that proficient at clerical tasks, let alone keeping the office organized.
Something Interesting about secretaries -- throughout most of the 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a real estate investment company. There were around a dozen senior vice presidents and they all had executive secretaries. These women, and they were all women, functioned as a sort of major domo and besides supervising clerical staff their most important characteristic was to know how to keep tneir mouth shut. They had access to information that they did not share.
The majordomo metaphor was perfect. Women don’t have the loose lips (braggart) characteristics of men in the workplace, in my experience. I had confidence in the talents of confidentiality of female coworkers.
This sounds as if you are describing a family office manager, albeit for the lower end. If ChatGPT is as revolutionary as is commonly alleged, I would expect these job duties to be instantiated in AI tooling. So I guess I don't really see this as a compelling vision for the "future of work" or how that topic intersects with ChatGPT.
“The secretary as confidential advisor has never had a place on organizational charts.” Hamilton was Washington’s Secretary to the President, considered the most powerful job other than president. Washington recognized genius and gave Hamilton tremendous latitude to design and implement the U.S. financial system, currency, etc. Hamilton was America’s greatest pirate, smuggling into the U.S. textile machinery and British tradesmen who knew how to assemble and run this technology, a technology which kick-started the U.S. Industrial Revolution. Reminds one of today’s China, no? Trivial fact: My mother served as a secretary to FDR during WWII. One of her responsibilities was managing his birthday correspondence. (“Hey, Mom! Throw Stalin’s birthday card in the circular file!”)
I agree, saving an expensive executive time and helping them get more done is a valuable role. In many cases, as Andrew mentions, this seems to have morphed into a chief of staff, which is higher powered and less tainted as a term these days. Apart from the largest companies, there aren't very many people making $1.5M a year.
Having said that, I'm not sure dictation, a human fielding AI spam, or the idea of your average assistant being on the Michael Ovitz track are very convincing.
When I was in middle management recently, I had part of an assistant's time. They were very helpful in filing time-consuming expense reports, organizing offsites, and unblocking difficult calendar changes. I still preferred to book my own travel and whatnot, and I never used them as a confidant or filer. So, a useful role, but not exactly a great career or a game changer.
The post rings more true at the CEO level, where every moment of time you can save with an assistant and/or chief of staff is probably worth it.
What I like about this guest post is that it shows the dignity in work, and the dignity of work, in the occupations that don't command fame or high status.
By the time I entered the workforce, there was no steno pool and what was a secretary was now the office manager. Instead of reporting to an executive or high-level manager, the office manager had to report to the entire floor. The pay stayed the same, and the manager title didn't come with any budgetary or hire/fire powers. The secretary was now a den mother, tasked with helping a hundred or more people with thousands of little tasklets.
This takes tremendous energy and physical and mental stamina to keep an office running. These roles ought to be dignified, and compensated accordingly.
This position, call it secretary if you want, is a great idea, but it will never happen. Contemporary organizations just don’t think that way. That’s why you can’t get a human being when you phone your bank, cable company, nor primary care doctor. Somehow they think that three options accessed by pressing buttons is all it takes to meet your needs. The million and a half CEO got to be a CEO by axing employees not hiring more. That’s our culture. This posting is a warm just so story; it will never be true.
Executive Assistants are still widely common in industry... they just have been gutted at the middle Managment layer. Most C-level execs and EVP/SVP kind of roles have them depending upon the company. The amount of wasteful spending at companies is incredible. There is plenty of penny pinching at the same time as splurges. There is much less rational planning of these things than many people expect.
They don't think that the automated answering/routing services are better.
They clearly are not.
But they are vastly cheaper, given the price of even relatively unskilled labor.
Unemployment in the US is the lowest in 50 years. You don't get rich by cutting costs, you get there by growing the business.
The two things are often kind of intertwined.
Investors are usually smart enough to seek profitable (high-margin) growth. In booms sometimes chasing the top-line causes low margin behavior that then gets attention whenever there is market volatility. Top line growth can hide a bunch bad practices, but also good ideas that just were too ambitious in hindsight for the emerging market conditions
I find this discussion amusingly retro. An assumption is being made that executive tasks will remain hierarchical in the new world of AI. Actually, I predict that the role of overseer may be in more in jeopardy than at of his/her assistant.
The job of the executive is to do what AI does much more effectively which is to sift through data and information and to determine the most optimal action to be 'executed.' We are already seeing CEO's in hoodies and jeans running mega corporations. The need for old style aristocratic protocol is gone and what an executive does now is very pragmatic - easily co-opted by a cheaper and more efficient AI program. We used to challenge computers to chess matches, now we challenge them to directing major corporations or governments.
It is quaint to believe that the old aristocratic hierarchy would survive such a tsunami of technological change. Perhaps this will usher in a new Renaissance with humans finding more humane things to do than sift data staring at computer screens? The possibilities here are enormous and wildly destructive to the status quo. We need to think much more broadly as to the role of humans in the world we're creating.
I agree. What is outlined here is not a compelling vision for the "future of work" or its intersection with ChatGPT.
My experience is that the job of the executive is talk out of both sides of their mouth, assess the politics of the office in terms of what can be done, what should be done and in whose interest it should be done. Any IT solution will provide IT blabber mouths with access to confidential information
My executive assistant was indispensable, and that was many many years ago. I can’t imagine how upper management works today.
Never was a fan of Gloria Steinem.
Niche luxury labor for "an executive earning $1.5 million per year" isn't the future of work.
Machine learning is here. It's going to make some jobs obsolete. It's going to create other jobs. It's going to be disruptive. And it's likely going to materially improve the vast majority of people's lives. It's great to see a piece that accepts that reality and addresses how to change with it instead of lamenting it.
The industrial revolution greatly reduced the role of physical strength in most occupations, thus allowing physically weaker people (men and women) to compete. Success became somewhat decoupled from brawn.
Who will the machine learning revolution benefit? If history is a guide, it may allow the intellectually weaker to compete (again). And we ought to welcome that! Machine learning may provide an alternative to the world Vonnegut hypothesized in his great book Player Piano. Maybe success can become somewhat decoupled from brain too.
It would elevate human characteristics that AI would have trouble replicating. I was going to say empathy but physical touch and other physical aspects/interactions, probably.
That leaves us humans with a pretty small area of expertise. I hope we're useful for something more than that.
What would a society in which essentially all human needs can be met without human labor actually look like? Marx suggests an optimistic outcome, but I can't get the "people" from the movie Wall-E out of my head.
Have we already forgotten that _more than four years ago_, Google was showing off a "voice assistant" tool that does a pretty good job at making appointments for you? What do you want to bet it's only gotten better? They're just keeping it under wraps because they need to figure out how to roll it out again without having people freak out.
https://youtu.be/ogfYd705cRs?t=2100
(Actually I believe the feature he talks about in that same segment of the keynote, about having the hours displayed in Google search results get updated based on a call to the business, _has_ rolled out across the US, and is now used quite widely. If you have a small business indexed by Google, the system will call you to check about updated holiday hours.)
Seems to me once you‘ve trained these incredibly efficient and seemingly perfect secretaries the best thing to do is hire several of them and get rid of the 1.5 million dollar executive, who doesn’t seem to be very competent or adding any real value, except in his own mind. Go a long way to address inequality.
When I worked at Philip Morris, Murray Bring, the General Counsel (a/k/a the Godfather), had two secretaries and he kept them both busy.