Your Job Title is a Lie

You Might Be a Wizard

One popular way to outline projects these days is the RASCI matrix. RASCI stands for the following:

• Responsible: The individual or team that will do the work.

• Accountable: The individual or team that ultimately answers for the outcome.

• Supporting: Individuals or roles that provide assistance, or hand-holding.

• Consulted: Individuals who provide advice or input.

• Informed: Individuals who need to be kept up-to-date on progress.

This is project management 101 stuff: (a) plan the work, (b) work the plan. But I’ve been selling technology consulting services for the past 7 years, and here’s the shocking secret that will gelatinize your mind: there’s almost always a disconnect.

See, my job is to give the customer the confidence that our firm will deliver. It’s not lost on me that technically, this makes me a “Confidence Man.” But no matter my empathy, preparation, documentation, and care, issues tend to fall into 3 main categories:

1. Customer Incompetence: For example, customers will sign a time and materials contract and expect an unlimited techno-butler on retainer. Or they will drag their feet on systems access, deliberate about nonsense, or try to sneak in extra scope.

2. Delivery Incompetence: The work will be “completed” and then falls apart.

3. Mutual Misunderstanding: The definition of “complete” is misaligned

Technology consulting fails not due to apathy, but because nobody is truly aligned on responsibility, authority, or even basic understanding. Paradoxically our language reflects and amplifies that failure.

Here are some juicy, real quotes from various mentors I’ve had over the years:

1. “The hallmark of the systems integration industry is that of gross negligence.”

2. “The general state of enterprise data is abysmal.”

3. “The cloud is yesterday’s software on somebody else’s computer.”

If this is what the vendors themselves are saying, what do you think the customers think? Why are they buying outsourced project labor?

We often employ the home-building analogy in the sales cycle: “you need to pour the foundation before you can build a data lake, etc.” Can you imagine if the home building industry delivered similar outcomes as the average technology system integrator? You'd need a full-time insurance adjuster just to visit your living room. But you don’t have to imagine! The Simpsons already did it!

“Can’t You Morons Do Anything Right?”

Because of price sensitivity for differentiated technical skillsets, many firms have made an imperfect bargain with offshore labor. Different regions have their own brand of chaos:

1. India: throw 10 engineers at a 2-person problem. Due to cultural hierarchy, “Yessir” or the figure 8 bobblehead motion is the answer to everything, regardless of understanding or intent to act.

2. Brazil/ LATAM: Manana culture.

3. Eastern Europe: Absence of velvet gloves for customer interactions; lots of job stackers.

Lets not leave out Americans.

Here’s what a CTO at a large US-based high-tech company told me: “The good onshore technology engineers and architects are pampered, entitled divas.”

So, how do we fix consulting?

We know that incentives drive behavior, but so does nomenclature. Today, there’s a big disparity between a person’s title and what they actually do.

“Executive” is a good moniker, assuming the person in the seat has actual executive function. It confers agency and the fact that they are the most consequential triggerman in the room. Are they? Time will tell or the Schimittian exception will reveal it.

Account Executive connotes this, but rarely does this title have all the leverage when speaking to an actual “executive” at a customer. In fact, many account executives are pre-sales project managers, herding the cats calendars to keep pace with a customer’s buying event.

On the delivery side, the titles “consultant”, “architect”, or “developer” all partially connote the responsibility, but they need dynamic, agentic action verbs attached, something that conveys the burden of bringing valuable outcomes into existence.

On the customer side, there are managers, who manage people, hopefully in the service of getting stuff done. There are also directors, who direct managers and others to get stuff done. And there are executives, who swing the ax.

But all of this is in the “Information” technology space. And information is not scarce. Data is not scarce. Knowledge is not scarce. Here is what is scarce: .

1. Actionable insights are scarce.

2. Autonomy to make profitable decisions is scarce.

3. Wisdom is scarce.

Many Chief Information Officers play gatekeeper like they are sitting on a treasure hoard. (Like IT in the Silo Series) That’s because they are. We’re talking about cybersecurity. Actually preventing fraud, ransomware, and verboten treasury access? This where the CIO as Smaug makes sense.

For all other business functions, what else are they guarding? Outdated dashboards? Forgotten SharePoint folders? Maybe we should be looking for Chief Wisdom Officers. Or more succinctly, we need to call these people what we expect them to be: Wizards.

Because any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. Corporate America should lean into magic. It might as well be magic for most. There are a shocking amount of people who don’t even have a rudimentary concept of how technology works. I once had a manager at a large software company who worked there there for 20 years. My job was to manage her big stupid spreadsheet, which was a glorified homework checker for salespeople. When I asked her if there was a better way to do this, she literally told me: “I’m not a techie.” She might as well have been in a cargo cult, tithing to the management gods via coconut phone for her paycheck. But if we changed her title from “Vice President of Strategic Operations” to “Valkyrie of the Expedient Lash” she may have been more inspired.

In this spirit, let’s brainstorm some more exciting titles for corporate America:

• Officer → Commander of Initiatives

• Manager → Chaos Wrangler/ Risk Shepherd

• Consultant → Solutions Mercenary/ Ronin

• Architect → Master Builder / Build Wizard

• Developer → Codewright

• Director → Navigator or Navigatrix (if a lady)

• Vice President → Execution Emissary

• Sales Executive → Cortisol Alchemist

Look at how much more fun we made white collar work! Semantics can really set you free.

These titles also allow for different epistemic approaches. If you want holistic approaches, you need deduction and instinct, tempered by experience. Moneyball is dead and never worked.

Anyway, the problem isn't just that some projects fail. The problem is that we keep pretending that language alone will save us.

Calling yourself a "Director" doesn't mean you're directing anything.
Calling yourself a "Consultant" doesn't mean you're consulting.
Calling yourself a "Security Officer" doesn't mean you're actually securing anything.

We don't need more dashboards.
We don't need more reports.
We need more wizards, and not just in name. We need wizards who do magic. Wizards who do Wizarding.

Here’s a spreadsheet you can download by becoming a paid subscriber:

Outcomes are the only real magic left. Be a man. A role model. An action figure. The action-verb you want to see in the world. Yer the Wizard now, dog.