title creep

When talking to my mother today on Mother's Day, she taught me some new vocabulary from the world of business. The two that stuck most were these:

1. title creep: this phenomenon is analogous to grade inflation. It refers to the way that people entering the workforce are demanding early and sooner to have various titles in their jobs, as well as quick and continuous advancement (with changing titles). Pretty soon the entry level position will be named "manager." It's just like the situation in colleges where every student feels they have a right to be "above average."

2. matrix management: this is basically a distributed network of accountability articulated within a globalizaed chain of command. It refers to the increasingly confusing set of network relations in which a worker's direct supervisor may be stationed in another country while they are laterally accountable to others in their same location. There is multi-accountablity, but the direction of accountability is dispersed into a distributed network.