Trash Your JobTitles -- Part I.

Do you want to plant some new seeds in your business? Do you want to change your company’s culture? Do you want to make a major change in what’s going on in your business so that everybody will start thinking about innovation, entrepreneurship, how to make your company better, how to make it more efficient and how to make it more effective? I’m going to tell you how to do it in one simple way! But it’s going to take some courage and some gumption on your part to make it work.

Here is the theme. Trash all your current titles. Throw them in the waste basket and start anew. Collect all your company’s organizational charts and the titles. Send them into the shredders. Start anew. Develop a whole new organization around your customer and around your products with new titles.

Let me tell you why. In the 21^st century, the old organizational thinking and titles don’t work. The electronic age has in a short time unequivocally and unambiguously destroyed all the old concepts of a managerial organization. Vertical information change has been replaced by horizontal access. We don’t need layers and layers of people anymore because everyone can have access to the same kinds of information. Charts are of no value because organizational communication is circular. It’s laminar, it’s linear, it’s parallel, it’s circumferential, it’s diametrical, it’s radial, it’s chaotic, and it’s iterative.

And by the way, it’s still not perfect.

With all the Web ways of communication and social media and the ways we connect, charts don’t make sense anymore. Charts used to make sense, because why? Because we needed to know who reported to whom so everybody wouldn’t report to the president. It’s the old Army theory. One person controls nine, nine people control another nine, and pretty soon you have a battalion.

But in today’s flat organizations, we don’t need the same kinds of thinking we’ve had in the past. In fact, that thinking gets in the way. It gets in the way of good communications.

Now listen to this. Here are some title ideas for you. Managers could be replaced by Switchers. Directors replaced by Gate Keepers. Product Managers are being replaced by Expanders, Shrinkers, and Wizards. Regional positions are being replaced by Bundlers. Essentially we’re entering or have entered … maybe your company hasn’t entered it yet, but it will … a new era of electronic organizations. You can discard the old labels and the old methods of understanding how organizations function, relate, work, build, culture, and implement new organizational plans because they don’t work anymore. The entire culture is changed.

You know this when you talk about how the new people that come into your company, how they’re a little bit different than the generation before them. Yes, things have changed. But that’s good. It’s an opportunity for you to be creative, to motivate all your associates and breathe new energetic life into your organization. But you must be disruptive. You can’t be evolutionary. You’ve got to be revolutionary. Remember again the planes and the trains. The trains didn’t think the planes were going to make, and the planes made it and the trains have problems. The Telex people never thought e-mail would make it. E-mail probably didn’t think Twitter would make it, and Twitter is doing just fine. Remember all the people that said Google would never make it, and they’ve made billions of dollars.

Stay tuned for Trash Tour Job Title Part II.