Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond
It’s no secret that many people love a title. Clever retailers have dropdown menus on their websites that allow customers to elevate their status to anything from Dowager Duchess to Field Marshal when ordering tweeds or corduroys.
Presumably this makes them feel better, and it may impress the postman, but it sits oddly with the trend among the young to drop not only titles but also surnames. That doesn’t mean the love of titles is waning. On the contrary. Modern life is all but impossible without a business card, and a business card looks embarrassingly naked without a job title. Such cards, however, often seem designed to impress more than to inform.
One way this is attempted is by placing ‘strategy’ or ‘strategic’ in the title. Thus the BBC has a ‘head of strategic change’, and Cultureshock Media has a ‘director of creative strategy’. ‘Strategic’ sounds good. It smacks of Alexander the Great, Nelson and Clausewitz.
Another way to suggest power is to go global: you can, for example, imply you run the world as a ‘global managing director’. The man with that title at Accenture, a consultancy, seems to do it through his responsibility for the firm’s ‘strategic relationship’ with the World Economic Forum. He’s also in charge of ‘thought leadership’ – like Kim Jong-un, I suppose. No surprise that he sits on the WEF’S Global Agenda Council on Europe and its advisory board on sustainability and competitiveness, and works with ‘major corporations on large-scale transformational programmes across multiple businesses and geographies’.
There are plenty of others like him. New York University has a ‘global professor of law’. RBS has a ‘global head of inclusion’. The Lisson Gallery has a ‘head of content’. Public Health England has a ‘chief knowledge officer’. Harvard University’s School of Public Health has a ‘senior fellow in advanced leadership’. Not ‘elementary’ leadership, please note: that’s Boy Scout stuff. The government has a ‘minister for equalities’, whose job description must lie in a synthesis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Nineteen Eighty-four.
The BBC has a ‘head of talent and change’, a ‘head of strategic change’ and a ‘director of transformation’. All three were no doubt involved in finding new titles for the ‘head of vision’ and the ‘controller of knowledge commissioning’ that aroused mockery a few years ago.
Job titles in Britain have often been misleading. Shakespeare’s plays were censored by the ‘master of the revels’, whose title derived from his former responsibility for all royal festivities, when he was presumably less of a killjoy. But there is now a proliferation of titles alluding to control over lofty abstractions such as strategy, knowledge and transformation that seldom reveal what the person does. Yet they do tell you something. They announce pomposity, self-importance and humourlessness.
A few institutions in Britain remain content to do without aggrandisement. The Royal Academy is still run by its ‘secretary’. Oxbridge colleges are usually overseen by ‘masters’, as are livery companies. The old universities still have ‘readers’ and ‘tutors’ and keep their professorships for those with chairs, while newer ones have puffed themselves up with ‘professors’ of every trivial activity imaginable. There are even a few companies run by a managing director, not a fatuous ‘chief executive officer’.
Occasionally, someone stands up for truth: Douglas Tompkins preferred to be North Face clothing’s ‘image director’, not CEO. But the outlook for title inflation is not good. Donald Trump has one vicepresident, and Goldman Sachs alone has 12,000. Their titles are as inflated as their ‘compensation’ – around £230,000 a year, before bonuses.