Open your inbox and look at the signature blocks of your colleagues across the headquarters:
Senior Category Manager, Indirect Procurement
Associate Director, FP&A
Senior Specialist, Talent Acquisition
Vice President, Enterprise Marketing
We tell ourselves this vocabulary provides “organizational clarity.” We tell ourselves it establishes clear reporting lines and preserves order.
In reality, it achieves the exact opposite: it forces everyone in the head office to play the Status Game instead of the Ownership Game [1].
Traditional titles are designed around an industrial pyramid [2]. They don’t tell you what business problem a person actually solves; they tell you where they sit on the corporate ladder. They answer one primary question: “Who outranks whom?”
If we want a modern headquarters that acts as an engine of entrepreneurial ownership rather than a slow bureaucracy, we must abandon 20th-century status signaling [3].
It’s time to move to Scope-Based Titles.
The Flaw of the Status Game
As entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant pointed out, human beings are constantly caught between two games: the status game and the wealth/ownership game [1].
Status is an ancient, zero-sum game: for one person to be number one, someone else has to be number two. To win status, someone else must lose [1]. Value creation and ownership, on the other hand, are positive-sum: when you solve real business problems and build capability, the pie expands for everyone.
When headquarters builds its identity on hierarchical prefixes (Associate, Senior, Lead, Director, VP), it institutionalizes the zero-sum status game:
Energy Channeled into Title Inflation: High performers spend mental bandwidth politicking for the prefix “Senior” or the leap from “Manager” to “Director,” competing for rank rather than expanding their actual contribution [1, 3].
Upward Management: When your title is defined by rank, your natural reflex is to look upward—managing internal perception and pleasing your superiors—rather than outward at the business impact [4].
Ambiguity of Real Responsibility: What does an “Associate Director of Commercial Finance” actually own? Do they own pricing? P&L consolidation? Investment appraisal? The title is heavy on prestige, but completely opaque on accountability.
High-performing teams don’t care about pecking order; they care about who owns the perimeter and the outcome [4, 5].
The Proposal: Two Rules for HQ Clarity
To rewire the culture from status to ownership, our naming convention needs to do two things: make the boundary of accountability explicit, and demystify the role of management.
Rule 1: Individual Contributors & Specialists = [Role] of [Scope]
Drop the vanity prefixes (Junior, Senior, Specialist II, Lead). Your working title simply states your functional craft and the exact business perimeter you own:
Instead of “Senior Financial Analyst” → Analyst of Opex & Commercial Finance
Instead of “Global Category Manager” → Buyer of SaaS & IT Infrastructure
Instead of “Senior Talent Acquisition Partner” → Recruiter of Commercial Leadership
Instead of “Brand Manager II” → Marketer of Enterprise Brand Strategy
The impact: Ownership becomes inescapable. When a question arises about enterprise software spend, colleagues don’t need an org chart to navigate who has the authority to talk. They go directly to the Buyer of SaaS & IT Infrastructure. It cuts out layers of introductory routing and pushes decision-making straight to the edge and the owner [5].
Rule 2: People Managers = Leader [Domain]
We strip away the corporate hierarchy vocabulary—Manager, Senior Manager, Associate Director, Director, Vice President.
If your primary role in the head office is allocating resources, clearing obstacles, coaching talent, and driving functional vision, your title is simple:
Instead of “Director of Financial Planning / VP Finance” → Leader Finance
Instead of “Head of Global Talent / VP Human Resources” → Leader People
Instead of “Chief Procurement Officer / VP Indirect Sourcing” → Leader Procurement
Instead of “VP of Corporate Communications” → Leader Communications
The impact: “Leader” is not an imperial rank; it is an organizational function [4]. It signals that leadership is an act of enabling and serving the owners of the scope, not sitting at the top of a caste system.
Restoring Job Grading: The Original Intent of Hay & Korn Ferry
The immediate objection from HR and executive teams is predictable:
“If we remove hierarchical titles, how do we evaluate jobs, set compensation bands, and manage promotions?”
The answer already exists in the tools we use: The Hay Group (Korn Ferry) Guide Chart-Profile Method [6].
Decades ago, Edward N. Hay designed job evaluation around three core pillars:
Know-How (depth and breadth of technical and managerial knowledge)
Problem Solving (the complexity of thinking required)
Accountability (Freedom to act, nature of impact, and the magnitude of the scope)
Somewhere along the way, corporate HR corrupted this logic. Companies took Hay points and translated them into rigid, bureaucratic title ladders (Grade 16 = Manager, Grade 18 = Director, Grade 20 = VP). The focus shifted from the scope of the work to the vanity of the badge.
This proposal does not eliminate grading; it restores it.
We still evaluate roles using rigorous Korn Ferry/Hay methodology. But the grade corresponds strictly to the complexity and magnitude of the scope, not to a title prefix [6, 7].
An Analyst of Global Tax Architecture may sit at a higher grade and compensation band than an Analyst of Regional Travel Expenses, because the scope, financial magnitude, and problem-solving complexity are objectively higher.
Both share a title structure that describes their craft, but their compensation tracks their actual scope of impact.
Career progression in this model means graduating to a more complex, higher-impact scope—not accumulating empty syllables in your email signature.
Language Drives Culture
Titles are not harmless administrative labels; they are cultural signals.
If you design headquarters around titles of status, people will build fiefdoms, fight for rank, and defer decisions to the highest badge in the room [1, 3, 4].
If you design headquarters around titles of scope, people introduce themselves by the problem they own. They make decisions faster, challenge assumptions, and run their domain with an entrepreneurial mindset.
Drop the 20th-century pyramid. Give people a clear scope, hold them accountable for the outcome, and let the work speak for itself.
References & Supporting Sources
Ravikant, Naval (in Jorgenson, Eric, 2020). The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing.
(Articulates the fundamental difference between zero-sum “status games”—hierarchical pecking orders where someone must lose for someone else to win—and positive-sum value-creation and ownership games.)Jaques, Elliott (1989). Requisite Organization: The CEO’s Guide to Creative Work and Leadership. Arlington, VA: Cason Hall & Co.
(Pioneered Stratified Systems Theory, demonstrating that real organizational capability relies on the ‘time-span of discretion’ and explicit clarity of operational scope, rather than artificial status layers.)Hamel, Gary & Zanini, Michele (2020). Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them. Harvard Business Review Press.
(Examines how bureaucratic titles and hierarchical escalators create internal friction, breed political maneuvering, and divert human talent away from real value creation.)Marquet, L. David (2013). Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Building Leaders at All Levels. Portfolio/Penguin.
(Introduces the “Leader-Leader” framework, arguing that management titles reinforce passive deference to authority, whereas delegating control and scope creates active leadership across all functions.)McCord, Patty (2018). Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility. Silicon Guild.
(The former Chief Talent Officer of Netflix explains why stripping away title inflation and corporate hierarchy in favor of high-context ownership drives high performance.)Hay, Edward N. & Purves, Dale (1951). “The Profile Method of High-Level Job Evaluation.” Personnel, Vol. 28, pp. 162–170; and Korn Ferry (2017), The Korn Ferry Hay Group Guide Chart-Profile Method of Job Evaluation.
(The foundational methodology of modern job evaluation, proving that grading was originally created to quantify the scope, complexity, and magnitude of impact—not to justify vanity title ladders.)Jesuthasan, Ravin & Boudreau, John W. (2018). Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work. Harvard Business Review Press.
(Argues for deconstructing traditional, rigid corporate titles into explicit scopes of work, capabilities, and business perimeters.)