Your Company’s Soul, In An Algorithm

Geoff Smith Portrait

BY Geoff Smith

POSTED ON JANUARY 7, 2020

I have this reactive stubbornness against people trying to run my life with their algorithms. My bias has always been that if you’re a robot, I’d like you to stay

But it now occurs to me that there’s an opportunity here I’ve been missing. Maybe we can organize the situation so that we enslave the algorithms we use,

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. It’s a fun story, so I’ve dined out on it a bit. It’s possible I should have been thinking harder, and laughing not so much.

About eight years ago, EllisDon was receiving too many resumes to professionally analyze and respond to them all. So our HR team found – bingo! – an

The HR team persisted. I persisted back. Until finally we agreed to see if the little digital thingee could predict what we already knew. That is, we would put

You know how this ends, of course. The algorithm instructed EllisDon not, under any circumstances, to hire their current CEO. The individual in question would

So we had a laugh at my expense, and the idea went out the window, at least for the time being. Except for something that took a few days to comprehend:

Which is why I thought then, and think now, that there is real danger here and one needs to be very careful. The algorithm wanted to make our most

Until this fairly obvious idea finally emerged, just recently: Ignore the vendors, pay what it costs, and create your own. Algorithms are inevitable, so we need

Do you want a company full of argumentative individualists or cooperative team builders? Do you like a higher risk/reward approach or the opposite? Whom

Buy someone else’s algorithm to run your business (and your life), and you will end up with someone else’s business, (and someone else’s life). These little

That’s it. Thanks for reading. (Megan and I have some close friends coming over tonight. We haven’t seen them in a while, it should be really terrific. I