Will You Have the Courage to Tell AI "NO" Or Just Play It Safe?

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In executive search, the allure of 'bright, shiny objects' often leads recruiters and clients astray. This fascination may be why the industry has a poor track record in selecting genuinely exceptional leaders, a consequence that should be noticed.

Recruiters rejoice when clients share their irrational exuberance because the finger-pointing is muted when things go wrong in this situation.  

The formula for success in white shoe search firms is to charge the client the most you can for a panel of applicants who look and sound good and then repeat the process with other clients as many times as humanly possible in 12 months. Voila. 

Rarely do recruiters today begin the search projects hoping to find that kind of transformative surprise, the exceptionally qualified and skilled leader who was not on anyone’s radar screen. This is not surprising given the number of applicants pouring in for most management and executive jobs. Even with the help of AI-powered Applicant Tracking Systems, computer programs that screen and route resumes to the appropriate project folder make it easier to stick with what is safe.

In today’s world, we are witnessing the arrival of powerful and frightening technology that, I believe, will make playing it safe and easy. However, there are some unfortunate and unintended consequences when certain decisions are left unchallenged.  

Will the machines catch what we mere mortals might miss—like that unknown surprise discovery of a super leader or maybe even a wonderful book that the other computers have already rejected? Will there be a search associate or consultant who will hit the pause button, or will they take the algorithm's word and stay in their safe zone? 

If we all migrated to the safe default settings in our career choices or the decisions we made once hired, wouldn’t this be a rather bland, uninteresting way of life?  

Think about what we all might miss.   This is the thing a retired recruiter turned executive coach might think about while sipping a great cup of coffee sitting outside under an umbrella on a muggy Saturday morning while perusing the Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal.

The trigger for today’s post was a WSJ dispatch that began in 19650 with the story of a junior editor in the Paris office of American publisher Doubleday who was told by her boss to write rejection notes for a slush pile of unsolicited submissions rejected by other publishers.  As she leafed the manuscripts, she came upon one with an author's photo attached.  Captivated, this junior editor, Judith Jones, five years out of Bennington College with a degree in English, pulled it from the rejection pile and spent the rest of the day reading.   When her boss returned, she told him, “We have to publish this book.” 

“What,” he sneered, “That book by that kid?” 

The boss, Frank Price, apparently saw Ms. Jones as merely  “a little girl Friday secretary.”

Ignoring her boss’s rebuff, she brought the manuscript to the attention of Doubleday’s New York office. “I made the book quite important because I was so taken with it and felt it would have a real market in America.  It’s one of those seminal books that will never be forgotten,” Jones recalled in a later interview.

Taking a risk bypassing her boss — going over his head, one might say —  this insightful woman is responsible for bringing the “Diary Of Anne Frank” to the world stage.  Of course, Ms. Jones got no credit for the find.  As was the case in those days of business, men dominated, and Mr. Price claimed the credit for Ms. Jones’ judgment. 

A native of New York's Upper East Side, Ms. Jones was described as having a spine of steel who scorned her classmates as conformists.  Her two favorite professors in college were management expert Peter Drucker and poet Theodore Roethke.  With this type of door-opening liberal arts education, she was indeed poorly suited for the role of “little Girl Friday secretary.” 

Jones’ fascination with another rejected manuscript produced another publishing coup, according to accounts.  By this time, Jones had returned to New York, where she was frustrated with the ingredients and recipes commonly found in the U.S., which in the post-war era was dominated by frozen and packaged food with an emphasis on ease and speed of preparation.   

The manuscript that caught her eye was “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” by Julia Child.

She did not stop there. Jones created the 18-book Knopf Cooks American series and brought to print authors like Lidia Bastianich, James Beard, Edna Lewis, and Jacques Pepin. 

Less you think she was a one-trick cookbook pony; Ms. Jones was the long-time editor for an impressive list of writers, including John Updike, Anne Tyler,  John Hersey, Elizabeth Bowen William Maxwell, Langston Hughes, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In 2006, Ms. Jones was awarded the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. 

One of the most essential lessons from Sara B. Franklin’s new book, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, which the WSJS reviewed, is that even in a male-dominated business world, Ms. Jones had the courage of her conviction. She was willing to take personal and professional risks to buck the system.  

So I ask, will these powerful AI computers that seem poised to take over so many of the screening decisions in recruiting and so many other aspects of our lives, including book publishing, be controlled by people with spines of steel to hit the pause button and argue for something exceptional?   Or, will these machines be seen as so infallible that we can rest assured that exceptionalism will be safe?  

Based on the early returns from AI-automated job applicant screening, we should be worried.   

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