Roberts explains the reasoning behind his title. Broadband is a complex, sprawling entity comprising 10 separate divisions; hence, the CVO concludes, “I have to have the vision to integrate them.”
Roberts says he’s the only CVO he knows of. But there are others out there: Harry Kletter, 72, was recently named chief visionary officer of Industrial Services of America, a Louisville, Ky.-based waste-management consulting firm. Kletter, who spent nearly 50 years as ISA’s chief executive officer before stepping aside for a new CEO, sees the CVO title as a way to maintain a role in the company without cramping his successor’s style. “I’m here if anybody wants to knock on my door,” says Kletter. “But I’m careful not to go knocking on theirs.”
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, being a chief was a rare thing. A handful of computer and aerospace-engineering firms employed chief technical officers, and federal agencies retained chief information officers even before that. The odd chief marketing officer and chief creative officer cropped up, too. But for the most part, CEOs, CFOs and COOs had little company in the executive stratosphere.
No longer. These days plenty of executives are throwing a novel noun or adjective–even, on occasion, a verb–between “chief” and “officer.” We can now rely on chief medical officers and chief nursing officers to take our pulse; chief legal officers and chief deal officers to handle our merger agreements; chief wireless officers to program our Palm VIIs; chief environment officers to handle our recycling. And when we’re feeling low, we can turn to one of two chief morale officers (begat by this spring’s market corrections).
While funky titles like guru, assassin and wizard began crowding the middle echelons of org charts in the early ’90s, it’s primarily in the last couple of years that the top dogs have been infected with titular logorrhea. A handy ailment to have as one moves from company to company, or threatens to do so, driving executive titles ever higher.
Not that New Economy players are really such big shots compared with their more modestly titled Old Economy counterparts. In dot-com land, says Jim Bethmann, co-head of Korn-Ferry’s tech- recruiting practice, “everybody’s already a VP. And when these guys make a move, they want it to look like a great move–whether it is or not.”
In the tech sector, employing a chief technology officer instead of a VP of engineering makes a certain amount of sense. But does that other Net economy forte, shameless hype, necessitate that every dot-com have a chief marketing officer?
“Titles are like grades at a bad school,” admits Michael Badar, chief marketing officer at business-to-business auto-parts site ChoiceParts. “There’s grade inflation.” Still, Badar insists that there is a logic behind his lofty job title: “It sends a message about what the company’s about. It’s saying, ‘I’ve got a senior guy on my staff in charge of marketing’.” One might argue that a similar message would be conveyed by the presence of, say, a senior VP of marketing.
Whatever the reasoning, the proliferation of chief officers can cause real headaches. “It’s made the recruiter’s job a lot more difficult,” gripes Korn-Ferry’s Bethmann. “You have to peel back the onion and make sure they actually accomplished something.”
Quinn Mills, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is even more emphatic. “It makes no sense–none,” he says of a title like chief business-development officer. “It’s just a title. People can see right through it.” But when it comes to bosses with wacky titles like chief zoom officer, chief smart officer and chief techie–all real–Mills is a bit more forgiving. “Then it’s not really a title,” he says. “It’s a statement about the culture the company aspires to. And that’s exactly the way an executive at another company would take it.”
Mills points out that as executives grow less eager for stock options, more and more dot-coms will be tempted to use bloated job titles as incentives–a move he calls “stupid.” “They think they can satisfy people by giving them status instead of money,” Mills notes. “But they won’t stay satisfied for long.”
