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very time I’m back from a trip to Silicon
Valley, my visiting card folder starts bursting at the seams from the number
of business people I’ve met. Earlier, I would only concern myself with the name
of the person and the organization he/she represented. However, over the last
couple of months, I have been drawn to “the fancy designations” of the people.
By all accounts, IT executives and techies are flaunting titles that completely
boggle the mind, and even tickle the funny bone. The last time I was in Silicon
Valley, for instance, I bumped into a Kool Bhat (original possible name
Kulbhushan Bhatt), director of content analysis; a Sunny Trehan from Sunnyvale,
manager of demand creation, and a Jag Singh ( Jagtej Singh), who is director, believe it or
not, of reinventing!
Silicon Valley today is littered with monikers (names) that are as imaginative as
they’re bizarre. In fact the more outlandish and complex sounding the moniker,
the more weighty the business card. In California, home to Silicon and sweat equity,
a new job title is in fact getting born every minute, and anything that does not
sound specialized enough, is clearly not hip! The famous Jerry Yang, founder of
Yahoo, now calls himself the “Chief Yahoo”! Even Bill Gates is no more the
Chairman and CEO of Microsoft but Chairman and Chief Software Architect.
Take the instance of a company like Netscape—the big Internet company—which
probably leads the list of IT companies that allow the use of zany work titles.
Apparently, and according to representatives of the company, employees have been given
a free hand (and allowed a fertile imagination) to pick a moniker for their
official business cards.
I remember, even a year ago, I had heard of designations of code juggler (he
wrote programs in C++ and liked to juggle as a hobby!) and a postmaster
general (who worked on the Netscape Messaging computer), and these titles I believe
were only the tip of the iceberg.
Most companies today are beginning to believe that titles create a good first
impression. And if they sound mysterious, it’s even more exciting. For salespeople
The Times of India November 18, 2000
Titles of the Net Economy
