So you say you want a revolution?

So you say you want a revolution?

Okay, here's what you do.

Step one: CEO pay is now genuinely breathtaking. As everyone knows, the average corporate chieftain (at least in America and to a lesser degree in Europe) earns many, many hundred times what their mid-level employee does. At the moment, boards of directors and stockholders are willing to put up with that because the former have close connections with the CEOs in question and the latter (particularly the smaller ones) don't have a lot of say in the matter.

But, suppose, you went out and gathered up and codified almost everything that a CEO needs to know to run a corporation. It wouldn't be that hard. In a sense, MBA programs have been trying to do exactly the same thing for years.

Okay, then, you take that information and roll it up as online databases, "expert-systems," "knowledge engines," and all the rest of it. Then, go out and license IBM's Watson or some other natural language technology and make that your user interface.

In short, you would then have a system with which almost anyone…anyone at all!... possessing a basic understanding of business could manage the biggest, badest, multi-national corporation on the planet.

Right, now envision the board of directors doing the math: pay multiple zillion-dollar salaries for a rock-star CEO, or offer $100K or so to some middling sort who may or may not even have an MBA.

Pretty soon, even the most incestuous board is going to get tempted…



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Now…Step Two.

This is harder. It may not even be possible. But consider it…

Make the same system cheap enough to run on every PC on the planet. Make it available to everyone. Make it possible for any human being to have the same skills as the most talented (read "obscenely overpaid") executive on the planet.

Then sit back.

And watch it all change.

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Onward and upward...