The condensation from the glass makes a perfect, cold circle on your palm. It’s too loud. The bass from a speaker somewhere behind the potted plant is vibrating through the floorboards, right up into your teeth. Someone you haven’t seen in years, Mark or maybe Matt, leans in, shouting over the music.
“So, what is it you do now?”
You take a sip of watery gin and tonic. The words form on your lips before you’ve even consciously approved them. “I’m a Digital Transformation Shepherd.”
The Digital Transformation Shepherd’s Reality
It sounds important. It sounds like you guide legacy corporations through the treacherous landscape of the digital frontier, a wise sage with a strategic map. Matt-or-Mark nods, impressed. He doesn’t need to know that you spent the last 49 minutes of your workday trying to get the new departmental printer to recognize A4 paper instead of Letter, a battle of wills that you ultimately lost to a blinking orange light. Your shepherding, today, involved a flock of one obstinate machine.
This is the great, unspoken schism of modern work. Your job title is a lie. Not a malicious lie, perhaps. It’s more of an aspirational, marketing-department-approved, C-suite-sanctioned fiction. It’s a title designed for a LinkedIn profile, for a conference badge, for a business card you hand to people you want to impress at loud parties. It is not designed to describe the endless chain of status-update emails, the budget approval spreadsheets, or the meetings about the pre-meetings that constitute the actual, unglamorous texture of your life.
The Crown and the Floor Polish
Why The Fiction Persists
Why do we do this? Companies believe these grand titles attract better talent. “Innovation Evangelist” sounds more appealing than “Product Manager Who Begs Other Departments for Resources.” “Growth Hacker” is sexier than “Marketing Assistant Who Knows How to Use Google Analytics.” It’s a cheap way to offer status when you can’t offer more money or, more importantly, more genuine autonomy. It’s a narrative gloss painted over a functional reality.
Sounds appealing
The actual role
And we, the employees, are complicit. We accept these titles. We wield them. I once saw a job title that read “Chief Inspiration Officer.” What does that even mean? Does this person walk around the office with a gong, offering profound quotes? Or do they, as I suspect, spend most of their time trying to justify their own budget for “inspirational off-sites” that are really just awkward trust falls and stale pastries?
I’ll admit, I used to think this was all just harmless corporate jargon. A bit silly, but ultimately meaningless. I argued with a colleague that a title is just a label, and the work is what matters. He said I was wrong, that the label fundamentally changes how you perceive the work, and how others do, too. I dismissed him. Now, I see he was right. My opinion has shifted entirely. The label sets an expectation that reality can never meet, and in that gap, resentment grows.
Promise Versus Delivery
Julia’s company recently rolled out a new internal communications initiative. The memo, all 9 pages of it, was dense with corporate speak about “synergizing our vertical integrations” and “optimizing our core competencies.” She, the Online Reputation Manager, was tasked with ensuring everyone understood it. Her title implied she should be crafting a strategic campaign. Her task was to get people to read a boring document. She knew, with absolute certainty, that no one would. People don’t have time. The sales team is on the road, the engineers are deep in code. They aren’t going to read a 2,999-word PDF that feels like a punishment.
This isn’t just about disillusionment; it’s about profound inefficiency. We create a whole parallel universe of language to describe work, and then we have to navigate the friction between that universe and the one we actually inhabit. How much collective time and energy is wasted on managing these fictions? The time spent crafting the perfect, meaningless title for a new role. The time employees spend trying to reverse-engineer what their grand title actually requires of them on a Tuesday morning. The psychic energy expended trying to reconcile being a “Disruptive Innovation Catalyst” with the fact that you need to fill out form 239-B in triplicate to order a new whiteboard marker.
The Cost of Inefficiency
% of real work vs. “fiction-managing” energy.
The Map Is Not The Territory
I’m guilty of it myself. For about a year, my LinkedIn profile declared me a “Narrative Architect.” I cringe just typing it now. I was a writer. I wrote articles and web copy. But “Narrative Architect” sounded like I was building cathedrals of thought, not just trying to find a clearer way to explain a software feature. The truth is, it confused recruiters and made clients think I was wildly expensive and probably a bit of a flake. I changed it back to “Content Strategist & Writer.” The inquiries I got became far more relevant. The architecture was a facade; the foundation was, and always had been, simply about putting the right words in the right order.
The real danger is when you start to believe your own title. You start to think the map is the territory. You become a “Visionary Storyteller” who has forgotten how to listen. You become a “Logistics Ninja” who can’t find a package. You become a “Digital Transformation Shepherd” who is so focused on the “digital transformation” part that you forget your primary job is to help the actual sheep-the confused, overworked employees-get where they need to go, even if that just means fixing the goddamn printer.