The only real advance in organizational development over the past 50 years is the reengineering of executive titles. We now have chief officers for every function and non-function, from marketing and information to experience and ethics. The purpose of all those c-level titles? One word. Ego.
That’s right; no company – no matter how big – needs more than a handful of executive officers, and small companies don’t need any.
Take Apple. The world’s most valuable company with a market cap of nearly $900 billion and 123,000 employees worldwide has just 11 senior executives: CEO Tim Cook, COO Jeff Williams, CFO Luca Maestri, chief design officer Jonny Ive, and seven senior VPs. That’s it. And just eight board directors.
Most startups have more c-level titles than Apple. That’s just ludicrous. And small businesses don’t need c-level anything, whether they’re organized as s-corps, partnerships or proprietorships. It’s all just for show – ego and attention – so little people can feel like big shots.
If you’re a CEO of a one-person company, congrats, you’re the boss of yourself. You’re the chief ego officer. Good for you. Don’t be too hard on yourself, though. I guess everyone has to feel special these days.
Pro sports teams used to have just one or two team captains. Lately it seems like every player has a “C” on his uniform. And every professor has suddenly become endowed with a name. Vijay Burbaxani of UC Irvine, is actually the Taco Bell professor of information systems and computer science. No kidding.
When I ran marketing for a Fortune 1000 tech company, fewer than 1% of all the corporations in America had annual revenues larger than my $50 million marketing budget, and that was just variable expense, not fixed or payroll. Was I a chief marketing officer? Nope. Did I care? Nope. And neither should you.
Business is not about you; business is about business. Making great products customers love is what matters. Doing a great job matters. Striving to be the best at what you do matters. And yes, compensation matters. When it comes to titles, all that matters is that people you deal with understand your function. Simple as that.
Don’t even get me started on self-employed slackers who call themselves leaders or entrepreneurs without ever having managed a soul or run a business. That’s just delusional.
I don’t know how everyone got it into their heads that the world needs more leaders and entrepreneurs, and I don’t care. We don’t need more chiefs. We don’t need more bosses. And we certainly don’t need more delusional narcissists who want to feel like big-shots.
What we need is more employees who are good at what they do. We need more people who get things done. We need more doers.
If you want to be successful, be a doer.
Image credit Pablo BM via Flickr
This post was a doozy. Couldn’t agree more. I was recently asked what positions I held in corporate life. My abrupt answer was “several; the sum total of them is nothing more than a mouthful of acronyms that seem meaningless today”. Here is a beauty . . . I might be recollecting wrongly, but I remember a story about how Best Buy develops product strategies and in-store merchandising. They use a fictitious family as a frame of reference for what and how they do things. Each member of the family has a name, acts a certain way and exhibits various preferences, buying triggers, etc., in line with their behavioral profile. “Jane”, the mother/wife, has a title. She is “CEO of the Household”. Way back when home theaters were in vogue, Best Buy marketers used to worry about their product displays, noting that Jane would not endorse the husband spending big coin if she saw all the wires and outlets necessary for it to function. So, they made sure all the wires and plugs in the demo areas were hidden. Anyway, Jane always had her act together. Plenty of parallels in life here, Steve, and I bet you could have a field day thinking this one through.
Besides, you don’t need a title. You’re BGH.
Awesome post! I especially like your ending “If you want to be successful, be a doer.”
I am always reminded “There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there”. Indira Gandhi
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/indira_gandhi_109081?src=t_work
First group. Agree with that. Meritocracy works…Or it should do! I stick to it even though I question myself on my adherence to it. Naivety? Who knows… but I still have a job.
Amen, Steve !