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JUDY ROSENER

IBM has placed full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Newsweek and Business Week showing pictures of people with non-traditional job titles. The Fast Company, a popular business magazine, has a regular column featuring non-traditional titles, and the men and women who choose them. Working Woman and other magazines use non-traditional titles in headlines of articles to attract attention to their stories.

Why so much interest in job titles?

The answer is that they send a message, much like rap music, body piercing, and non-conventional dress. While not all that new, the message is nonetheless newsworthy the world ain’t what it used to be. These new titles represent a subtle undermining of the corporate establishment a diffusion of power and a challenge to the corporate elite.

We are witnessing the birth of a new corporate culture, one less concerned with hierarchy and rigid rules of dress and behavior, and more attuned to the playfulness and innovative nature characteristic in an entrepreneurial environment.

New job titles are part of that shift, a 21st century “newspeak.” The IBM ads are particularly interesting because they send a signal that Big Blue is aware of this phenomenon. They show men and women with titles such as “Euro Resource,” “Survival Specialist,” “E-Business Accelerator” and “Ethical Hacker.” None of those featured in the ads is dressed like a “corporate type”; quite the contrary, their dress is all over the map.

What do these people do, how important are they, and where do they fit in the organizational chart? The “Euro Resource” helps companies turn euro conversion hazards into euro conversion opportunities, and as the value of the European dollar increases, the Euro Resource could be a major financial player in a firm.

The “Survival Specialist” helps prevent the loss of a company’s critical business functions when disaster strikes, whatever form the disaster may take. In a sense, the “Survival Specialist” is a contingency planner, much needed in a fast changing, uncertain work environment. The “E-Business Accelerator” plans, designs, and implements e-business solutions in achieving and exceeding business goals, clearly a function whose time has come. And the “Ethical Hacker” analyzes whether a computer system is susceptible to hackers an important function in any information dependent company.

The Fast Company columns telescope the emerging new culture, not with ads, but with explanations of non-traditional titles and the people who use them. For example, Barb Karlin of Intuit Inc. says she calls herself “Director of Great People” because her challenge is to recruit and retain top talent in a very competitive market. She implies by her title that the terms “Personnel Director” or “Resource Manager” don’t cut it today, and that Intuit is a firm that thinks its employees are great people.

Tom Wong of Devlin Applied Design (formerly called the Creative Director) has renamed himself the “Creative Undertaker” because he contends that his job is like an undertaker who restores life to lifeless projects. Mark Halper, who wrote about him, says that Wong’s unique title hasn’t spooked any of his blue-chip clients FedEx, IBM, and Lotus.

“Insight and Futuring Manager” is another non-traditional title, one held by Amy King Schindler of Ford Motor Co. Her job, traditionally labeled analyst or market researcher, is to manage insights about the future. Part of doing so is to look at the values of different generations and determine (by being insightful) how they impact the car market. Sure it’s market research, but her title gives it additional meaning.

My favorite new title is “Raging Inexorable Thunder-Lizard Evangelist for Change.” That’s what Brian Yoeman, of the Health Science Center at the University of Texas, Houston, chooses to call himself. Responsible for more than 200 employees in a classic hierarchy, he no doubt decided to rename himself to better reflect his values. Being a thunder-lizard, he says, is about fighting the notion that passion doesn’t belong in the workplace. Clearly, to Yoeman, it does. He borrowed the term thunder-lizard from Guy Kawasaki’s book, “Selling the Dream.”

Why are these titles important? Because they illustrate the language of change, and because words structure the way people think. Particularly in new firms with young leaders, there is a tendency to snub one’s nose at the power elite, and one way to do that is to use terms which pick at the conventional. These new titles reflect a culture of informality and lack of concern about status. More important, they reveal the fleeting nature of traditional functions in a fast changing, technological, entrepreneurial workplace.

For this reason, attention to the job title “newspeak” is warranted. As Thomas Paine said in “The Rights of Man,” “Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title.”

Judy B. Rosener is a professor in the Graduate School of Management at UC Irvine. She is the author of “America’s Competitive Secret: Women Managers.” She can be reached at [email protected].

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