Corporate titles are a sort of no man’s land at the moment. Organizations seem to have stopped caring, and what’s more, have relinquished any authority to standardize and regulate the sentences their people put under their names in business cards and specialized social media1. And we, mortal insecure featherless bipeds, sensed the lack of damns given by those in power and seized the opportunity to adornate our egos with lengthy, pointless piles of nouns and adjectives.
As per titles—needless to say—everyone is a manager. A senior manager. I once saw someone in my network going from “intern” to “specialist” in one single pirouette. Meteoric career progress.
There are those who, while still retaining a tiny bit of decency, sprinkle their most likely irrelevant roles with nouns such as “product”, “project”, “delivery”, “customer”, “sales”, “analysis”, “operations”, “business” and of course the recently discussed “solutions”. Mind that they can all appear in random orders: some might be doing “operations sales”, while another be doing “sales operations”. Or, “operations analysis” on one hand, “analysis operations” on the other hand. Every particle has an antiparticle.
The flashiest, and as we perhaps start to decline in terms of psychological sturdiness, go for things as “visionary” and “disruptor”. Chief Happiness Officers are actually a thing.
And the really special ones are those relying on the infamous vertical bar to concatenate things like there is no tomorrow: Chief Architecture Manager | Guru | Advisor | Innovator. They may even go the extra mile and include their previous gigs in their title, like | ex-ACME. Sure, those are not titles anymore, but tiny one-line CVs that give me eye pain when I come across them.
Liberace was an American pianist, singer, and actor known to resemble the exact opposite of what you can call “minimalism”. He famously said:
“Nakedness makes us democratic, adornment makes us individuals.”
In everything we do in life, there is always an invisible line that, should that line be crossed, it just becomes too much.
Years ago, an argentinian pseudo-celebrity called Gisele Rimolo used her 15 minutes of fame to set up a beauty clinic where she offered “treatments” for losing weight and other “benefits”. In a statement—and while being secretly filmed—she claimed to hold a long list of bullshit doctoral titles earned from obscure, almost laughable “universities”. Eventually, and sadly quite unsurprisingly, someone died, and she spent almost a decade in prison.
I get strong “Rimolo” vibes while reading through my LinkedIn feed.
Can they even regulate it in any way?