Hello and welcome to my talk at CEOConf today. As CEOs, we have one job: help our shareholders make more money. And nobody did this better than one man, Jack Welch.
*audience cheers*
Yeah, he’s great. I love him. I have his portrait on my nightstand.
Jack Welch was so much better at the capitalism game than the rest of us. He taught us two things. One: laying people off. He showed us that you can just fire people and the product still works. He fired the bottom 10% of his workforce every year. And revenue kept going up. The man was a visionary.
And two: outsourcing. Why make your own light bulbs when it’s cheaper to get them somewhere else? Why employ Americans when there are other countries?
From 1981 to 2000, GE’s annual revenue went from $28 billion to $130 billion. Earnings rose from $1.65 billion to $12.74 billion. The stock price increased 40-fold. All under Jack. Then he retired.
*audience claps*
Okay, although Jack is no longer with us, today we are presented with new ways of implementing his wisdom. Yes, I’m talking about AI.
It really is magic. My son does all his homework using ChatGPT. I don’t even know how he does it! These young people are amazing. The future is going to be great.
*audience gasps in admiration*
We can make our engineers use AI to write code. Produce the same output with fewer people. Someone on Twitter claims it’s a 10x, if not 100x increase in productivity. You know what that means?
Yes, we can lay off 90% of our engineers. Outsource the coding to the AI companies. We can all be Jack Welch.
All the big tech companies are already doing it. Our friend Mark Zuckerberg is training an AI to replace himself. Truly inspiring.
And speaking of Zuckerberg, he famously said “move fast and break things”. I asked ChatGPT for a better slogan and it came up with “move faster and break more things”. This proves that AI is already better than Zuckerberg.
So act fast, or you’ll get left behind.
OK, we have some time for audience questions.
“What happened to GE after Jack Welch retired?”
Pretty good, I bet, since Jack left them with such a strong foundation. And this is not important. Who cares about the company after you retire? Next question.
“What if the AI-generated code is, uhh, subtly wrong?”
*audience boos*
That’s not really our problem, is it? The short answer is: you make the engineering lead apologize, then fire them. Maybe fire the entire engineering department.
The longer answer is: focus on optimizing the metric, externalize the cost, and be gone before the bill arrives. Like Jack would.
Again, thanks for coming to my talk. If you enjoyed it, please connect with me on LinkedIn and PornHub.