Culture
With Technokings and Block Heads, why even be a CEO?
Chief executives are going out of style in favor of the alternative milk of corporate leadership: whatever dumb title you can come up with yourself.
Jack Dorsey will no longer be CEO of Block (the financial company formerly known as Square) and instead will now be referred to as the company’s Block Head, per a new 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and spotted by The Verge.
The title change went into effect on April 20 (naturally) and won’t impact Dorsey’s responsibilities or role at Block. As “Block Head and Chairperson” he’ll simply have a name more in line with the company’s very chill website and horrifying leadership portraits.
If an eccentric tech founder changing their official title to a goofy joke sounds familiar, that’s because Tesla CEO and owner of Twitter Elon Musk did something similar last year. If you missed it, Musk is Technoking of Tesla, a title that’s certainly not concerning at all.
An idea — If you’re a CEO reading this, what are you doing with that stinky old chief executive title? Spice it up! We clearly entered the tech industry’s Dada period several years ago, so at this point, why not go full nonsense with what people call you?
Some jumping off points:
The Walt Disney Company — “Current Bob”
Former CEO Bob Iger oversaw some monumental moments in Disney’s modern history — I’m thinking specifically of the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm, and everything entertainment-focused at 20th Century Fox — and Bob Chapek, his successor, used to lead Disney Parks. I’m not saying you have to be named Bob to lead Disney, far from it, but maybe it helps?
Amazon — “Head of Everything” or simply, “Baron”
Amazon is frequently referred to as the “Everything Store” so getting that in a title makes some amount of sense, that being said, Baron Jassy has a certain ring to it.
Netflix — “The Source From Which the Stream Flows”
Netflix has co-CEOs so I’m not sure how that would work out with this, but data is really the one running the show, right?
You get the idea. The sky’s the limit folks.
