Ethan Mollick

speaker

673 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Ethan Mollick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Strange Loop Podcast · Ethan Mollick | The long way is the shortcut: experiments over AI playbooks · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

But they all kind of suck to live through.

Charles Dickens is all about how much the industrial revolution sucked, right?

And so I think we're in for a chaotic time.

And I think being broad-based will help you in a place where this chaos is occurring.

So I think there's a difference between big M management and small M management.

So small M management being a superpower is the better you are at managing work, the better you are using AI.

If you can define what you want, all the things managers do, right?

So just to give you a bunch of TLAs, three-letter acronyms, right?

If you're good at PRDs, if you're good at SOPs, any of the RFPs, any of the stuff that we do to give commands to people to get something done,

AI is increasingly able to just take those commands and run with it.

So one form of superpower is being good at assigning work, understanding where the risks are, where the downsides are, assessing output quickly, having the expertise to do that.

That small management makes you good at AI right now.

Then there's sort of the big M management question, which is how do you manage your organizations or think about these kind of issues in a bigger sense?

And I think there is some question about whether you have management layers collapse, right?

Can the CEO just manage more things because a lot of the middle management layer is done by AI?

Or does this increase the span of middle managers?

One of the trends that I've been seeing in companies has been collapsing the role of product manager and coder together into a single builder title, for example.

And everybody just does the same work.

We did this experiment at Procter & Gamble where we took 776 of their employees, had them work either individually or in teams of two, cross-functional teams of two, business and technical people.

And this was using GPT-4, so really obsolete system at this point, not agentic at all.

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