Just Call Me "Excellency"

The Wharton School looks at title inflation. An excerpt:

Long before the proliferation of chief you-name-it officers, companies and individuals came up with creative titles, some serious and some irreverent, as a way to distinguish their roles and to send a message to their constituencies. In the 1980s, Guy Kawasaki called himself chief evangelist at Apple Computer -- a title that seemed rather quirky at the time, but would hardly raise an eyebrow today. On the Yahoo website, co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo are listed as chief yahoos, along with a CEO, CFO, chief sales officer, chief strategy officer, chief accounting officer, chief communications officer, chief data officer and "chief people yahoo." In other companies, chiefs now run the gamut from chief blogging officer and chief hacking officer to chief customer insights officer, chief sustainability officer and chief knowledge officer.

These titles and others are often tied to recent events or trends, such as chief ethics officer, reflecting the post-Enron concern with corporate corruption; chief security officer, showcasing the need to keep all systems and information flows secure from theft and terrorism; chief reputation officer, a response to attacks on companies' brands by bloggers, reporters and competitors, among others; chief privacy officer, reacting to public outrage over companies' failure to protect private data; and chief apology officer, issuing apologies for poor service (think airlines) and promising to do better.