Companies are always on the lookout for cheap ways to reward their employees, and what could be cheaper than a grandiose title or a purely symbolic “employee of the month” award? As the comic-strip character Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss once announced, “I’m promoting you from senior engineer to lead engineer. The pay’s the same but people will disrespect you less.”
Such tactics are not entirely new: more than 50 years ago, the humorist Michael Flanders created a dogmatic cannibal who was “chief assistant to the assistant chief”, and presumably he had a particular organisation man in mind. The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist, meanwhile, notes that in the 1940s the late Senator Robert Byrd held the title “exalted cyclops” in the Ku Klux Klan.
Today, vice-presidents are commonplace, and alongside CEOs and CFOs we have chief security officers and chief privacy officers – although the title of chief apology officer for Southwest Airlines was bestowed by a journalist, not by the company itself.