There is a philosophical problem embedded in the word agent. It derives from the Latin agere — to do, to act, to set in motion. An agent is someone who acts. But in common usage, an agent is someone who acts on behalf of another. The two meanings coexist in uneasy tension, and anyone who has spent serious time in the role eventually feels that tension in the body.
Michael Ovitz felt it.
His 2018 memoir, Who Is Michael Ovitz? chronicles the arc of a man who built the Creative Artists Agency into the most powerful talent representation firm in Hollywood — and who ultimately found the role of agent something he had to escape. The work of an artist’s representative on all matters required Ovitz to be skilled at representing what Ovitz was not. Years of that produce a specific erosion — the gradual loss of the distinction between what you believe in and what you are paid to advance. By the time most agents feel that erosion, the erosion is already the story of their career.
I know that accumulation as well.
Executive recruiting is structurally identical to talent representation, even if the rooms are different. I entered the work because I believed in human potential — not as an abstraction, but as a practical observation made across thousands of conversations with people who were capable of more than their current role was asking of them. I developed a genuine capacity to see what a human being, given a change in circumstance, could become. Not just where that person was today professionally, but the gap between a candidate’s current condition and the candidate’s highest expression of capability. Then I discovered that the work required me to carry a candidate’s cause into rooms that the candidate could not access, to advocate for a candidate’s value with people who had never met that candidate.
What the role of an agent actually asks of you
Representation, done well, is a form of service. When the match is right — when I had genuinely read a person’s capability and translated that capability into an opportunity that fit — the result was something productive and real in that person’s life. The quality of engagement that follows a right match is unmistakable. Michael Ovitz recounts a phone call he received from David Letterman after Ovitz successfully navigated Letterman’s move to CBS late night from NBC. You feel it when it lands.
But the recruiter’s position is structurally peculiar in a way Ovitz would recognize immediately. Every conversation, every negotiation, every door I opened — none of it was mine to keep. I was a channel, not a principal. The careers I moved were not mine. The ambitions I expressed to hiring committees were not my ambitions. And the moment a candidate stopped being present in the candidate’s own pursuit, I was no longer amplifying something real. I was carrying dead weight dressed as potential.
When abdication enters the picture
Agency, by nature, can be transferred but not duplicated. When a candidate handed me the wheel of their career and sat back — waiting to be placed, waiting to be told their market value, waiting for a hiring manager’s decision to determine what happened next — I wasn’t amplifying that candidate’s potential. I was carrying that potential on behalf of a person who had stopped carrying it themselves.
As an agent, recruiter, representative or enabler, abandoned agency becomes an anchor.
Every placement I made on behalf of a candidate who was not engaged in their own pursuit landed wrong, even when the placement was technically correct. The candidate who didn’t own their decision to commit to their new role did not produce the quality of commitment that makes someone indispensable. The candidate took a job because I told the candidate the job was right, and the candidate began looking again when the first real difficulty arrived — because the candidate never actually was as personally invested.
My success rate as an executive recruiter was inordinately high, because I resisted accepting responsibility for either of my stakeholders – the client or the candidate. It was the single key to my success, but it also resulted in significantly less placements.
Where I settled for high quality and business outcomes with limited downside, Ovitz went big, went for volume, and in so doing, admittedly was forced to replace truth in representation with something more akin to “packaging deals” for the sake of volume and revenue.
The desire to enable versus the desire to remove difficulty
The desire to help someone find their true calling that matches their capability is a genuine form of love. Not sentimental love, but the harder kind — the kind that wants something real for another person. Not comfort, not a lateral move that keeps a candidate employed and unchanged. Growth. Fit. The alignment between what a person is capable of and what that person is actually doing every day.
What I could not do — what no agent, no recruiter, no mentor can do — is want that alignment for a candidate more than the candidate wants the alignment for the candidate’s own life.
Enabling someone means building that person’s capacity to act. Removing difficulty means acting in that person’s place. These two things look similar from the outside. They are not the same, and confusing them is how a recruiter ends up exhausted and a candidate ends up in a job that never quite fits.
Ovitz was bored because Ovitz was acting, in both the theatrical and ethical sense.
Ovitz was performing a function that required Ovitz to be something other than what Ovitz was, in service of clients who were also performing rather than pursuing. I reached the same wall.
The exhaustion is not a character flaw. The exhaustion is the predictable consequence of spending years carrying ambitions that were never yours to carry.
Ovitz, in his own words, paid the price of nurturing of and enablement of Jay Moloney, an agent he mentored and considered as a son. After Moloney committed suicide at the age of 35, Ovitz was forced to face his role in pushing and molding Moloney to act in service of CAA and the partners, even if it meant for Moloney to act in ways that collided with his character and belief systems.
What the AI era reveals about all of this
We are now in a period where the word agent has acquired a new technical meaning — an AI agent perceives, decides, and acts within an environment on behalf of a user. The language of human agency and artificial agency has collapsed into the same vocabulary.
That collapse is instructive.
What we are building, in both the technological and the human sense, is something designed to reduce the friction of decision for a person who could, in principle, decide. The question the technology does not answer — and the question I never could answer in a recruiting conversation either — is whether reduced friction produces better decisions, or simply faster abdications.
The most capable candidate I ever represented knew exactly what she was after. Not a job title. Not a salary range. She knew the quality of the problem she wanted to wake up thinking about, and she could describe that quality specifically enough that I could work with it. That specificity made everything else possible. I took what she knew about herself, translated that knowledge into a search, and opened a door. She walked through the door herself. That placement held — because she had chosen it before I ever called her.
The candidates who handed me their careers like problems to be solved — I could work those searches. I could place those candidates. What I could not do was follow them through the door. The interview had to be theirs to win. The offer had to be theirs to earn. And Day 1 — the environment, the problems, the consequences of the choice — that landed entirely on the candidate, regardless of how well I had read the fit. A candidate who never owned the pursuit could not suddenly own the role. The placement looked complete from the outside. It rarely was.
The limit of what another person’s willingness will allow
If the desire to enable is genuine, a recruiter eventually has to confront what another person’s motivation and personal circumstances will and will not allow. A recruiter can open doors. A recruiter can’t walk through a door for someone else, and every attempt to do so is a form of disservice dressed as help.
The most honest thing I could offer a candidate who had abandoned the candidate’s own agency was not a solution. It was a direct question:
what do you actually want, and what are you willing to do to get it?
Some candidates answered that question. Most did not. The candidates who didn’t answer moved on to the next recruiter, handed that recruiter the same weight, and waited again for someone else to carry them somewhere they had not yet decided they wanted to go.
The frustration was never about capability. Every candidate I walked away from was capable. The frustration was that capable people had chosen not to act on their capability. The gap between what a person could pursue and what that person had decided to let happen to the person — that gap is the specific grief of everyone who ever took the work of human development seriously.
Today, we are building agents to act on our behalf because reducing friction feels like progress. But Ovitz didn’t burn out because CAA failed. Ovitz burned out because he spent decades wanting careers for people more than those people wanted the careers for themselves.
That grief is recognizable to anyone who has tried to help someone who was not helping themselves. The question the AI era is forcing, whether we are ready to answer it or not, is this:
What are you abdicating, what are you handing over, and what will you be left with when the agent you built to carry it has carried it somewhere you never actually chose to go?