My eye was just taken by a business card I had sitting on my desk to remind me to chase someone up who works in a small indigenous language centre in Central Australia. I visited their modest office in a remote part of Australia earlier in the year.
I am not sure how many people have full time positions with this centre, nor how much actual business they turn over each year. “Not many and not much” would be my assessment. They do a good job, I suspect, with few resources. Important work without a doubt.
What struck me as the title of the manager on the business card – Chief Executive Officer. What is wrong with the far better title “Co-ordinator”?
Not vertical enough to fit in with the whole pack-of-cards hierarchy of pretence which exists in the business world! An unearthed corporate culture fashion which not only infects the urban centres but which has spread into the core of life in a remote part of Australian life.
I had just been reading some of Rupert Murdock’s thoughts – from his lofty corporate eerie - regarding climate change and his assessment of the present Australian Prime Minister. Ugh!
So I wondered, if the manager of a small language centre in Central Australia can be seriously regarded as a Chief Executive Officer then – in the interests of preserving some sense of scale across the management-proprietor continuum how are we to consider someone in Murdock’s position. He is clearly no mere Chief Executive Officer.
MISMATCH BETWEEN VALUES AND UNITS OF MEASURE
When I was very very young boy in New Zealand I once saw a coin called a “Farthing” in some loose change - a quarter of a penny. It was not in circulation and the half-penny was the smallest unit of actual hard currency. That’s long gone too.
As we know, there has been a kind of slippage both in terms of the units of currency and what value they represent – so that, in Australia, we have already seen the departure of one and two cents coins, and the five cent coin is almost redundant. (In New Zealand, i think the ten cent coin is already the smallest unit, with the 20 cent coin and the 10 cent coin playing a role similar to the old Penny and Half-penny).
When I hitched from Townsville to the Northern Territory in 1978 I spent my last two dollars buying a packet of tobacco and a carton of milk at Charters Towers. Two dollars? Seems hard to believe now.
This sort of slippage has a linguistic cousin when titles like Chief Executive Office can be applied to the manager of a small enterprise.
So I think we now need to coin some new titles which will restore the relativity of values to top positions in the otherwise self-effacing corporate cultures in which it is our good fortune to be surrounded. Not.
NEW TITLES FOR OLD
Chief leads, in my mind, to Big Chief. And Big Chief to – well – seeking to bridge the gap between the manager of a small enterprise in a country town through the ranks of middle and executive managament to someone at the helm of the Murdock behemoth:
Chief Executive Officer (formerly Office Manager)
Big Chief Executive Officer
Very Big Chief Executive Officer
High Chief Executive Officer
Grand High Chief Executive Officer
Supreme High Chief Executive Officer
Supreme Grand High Chief Executive Officer
Lord High Chief Executive Officer
Lord Grand High Chief Executive Officer
Lord Supreme High Chief Executive Officer
Lord Supreme Grand High Chief Executive Officer (reporting directly to Mr Murdock)
At which stage we release a balloon to make a farting sound as it whips around the room deflating and, in order to catch something of the spirit in which we should regard such matters, cut to Gilbert and Sullivan, whose industrial-age musicals represent the zeitgeist to which the historical rump of yesterday’s top-down men like Murdock and the Abbott Government belong.
I like the down-to-earth term ‘Co-ordinator’.
How about "Co-ordinator General"? No way!
