When your business title is “Genius” you have a lot to live up to. This is what the Apple technical support crew is faced with every day as hundreds of angry and confused customers stream into Apple retail stores and belly up to the Genius Bar for help. As one of those addled customers awaiting my appointment recently, I thought the geniuses must be a confident lot to carry that title around. No room for insecurity there. Although, let’s face it, they are protected somewhat, since it’s kind of tough for customers to pushback on the genius. What do you say? Anything would sound petulant and sophomoric. Only a genius can take on the genius, and if he or she was a genius what would he or she be doing going to the Genius Bar in the first place? He or she would just stay at home and figure it out.
Of course, most business titles are so prosaic and uninteresting. Manager, director, vice president, senior vice president, and the various “C-level” monikers. These are the standard fare. Ho hum. So why are we so covetous of these titles? Especially now that so many of them have become devalued, like currencies in distressed and unstable countries. For instance, most bank employees are vice presidents, or so it seems. Even the youngest staff with peach fuzz faces sport the VP title. Talk about grade inflation. To differentiate among them some institutions have added descriptors to form titles like First Vice President, Second Vice President, and so on. It leaves you wondering how many levels of VP they have. And does it really matter?
On the other hand, I met a guy from Disney once whose title was Chief Imagineer. Now that’s a title worth writing home about! He looked the part too, with Santa beard and suspenders. Maybe titles should be more descriptive like that. Certainly could make for more interesting conversation at a cocktail party. Hi, I’m Don - I’m First Vice President at XYZ Corporation versus Hi, I’m Don - I’m Chief Imagineer at XYZ Corporation. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist (another great descriptive title) to know who is going to draw the bigger audience.
But, if that’s too hard, another option would be to get rid of titles altogether. The Japanese learned decades ago that workers were more productive when they got together to solve a problem and didn’t know the titles of the others with whom they were working. Less intimidation. Less posturing. More independent and diverse thinking. Everyone would be more anonymous. Sounds good, no? To do this in your company you just have to find someone to propose this idea to good ol’ what’s-his-name in the fancy corner office.
thought you were going to write about when you went in and pretty much told the genius' manager that his so called genius' were dumb... perhaps a sequel?
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