Re: [Sigia-l] To Title or Not to Title (Was: Becoming and IA)

From: Alexander Johannesen (alexander.johannesen_at_gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 27 2005 - 02:00:40 EDT

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Oh dear!

> > I tend to agree with Ziya.

On 6/27/05, Scott Nelson <skot_at_penguinstorm.com> wrote:
> dangerous.

Because you don't agree with him (and hence not Scott), and will
engage because of that? Because they're outright wrong? Scott agreed
to something he said. Now why is that dangerous? I tend to agree with
Ziya. I agree with others too. Am I in the danger-zone, too?

> > Titles are meaningless.
>
> Doctor. Lawyer. President. Senator. Judge. Vice President. CEO.
>
> These are not meaningless titles. Be careful to overgeneralize.

Hang on; Doctor of what? Wich doctor? New-age doctor? Doctor Doctor?
Surgeon General? And lawyer where, doing what? Need a lawyer of
homicide speciality, and get a lawyer deep in environmental issues of
animals? President ... of the local club house. Opel Senator, my car.
I'm a judge of things, for instance, I didn't like the movie
"Fiddlesticks". CEO of the OneManBand.

No, titles in themselves are meaningless. Context is everything.

"What do you do for a living?" Oh, I'm a plumber. "Great, I've got
this leak ..." Sorry, no I do gas pipes only. WTF?

> Congratulations to you on succeeding with a consistent title. I tend
> to agree with Donna's view, which I'll summarize thusly:
> "We're looking for an Information Architecture!"
> "Hey - I do Information Architecture!"
> "Yay. We should talk."

And then they talk, where the company want someone to create simpler
labels onto an existing application, while Alex the IA is a master of
faceted medical thesaurii lookup systems. Hmm, and Alex not going to
let IA get in the way of him being an IA creates labels that suck, and
since the company think he's an IA, they think the labels are great.
How do the quantify that, apart from him being an IA?

> this may, of course, lead to:
> "We're also looking for..."
> "Oh yeah. I do some of that, and can help find some others..."

Networking is networking, not IA specific I would think.

> or, if the conversation were being held with (for example) Ziya:
> "We're also looking for..."
> "Bah. What a waste of time. I can make all of your problems go way,
> and don't need any other bodies cluttering the path to my brilliance."

What the hell is this Ziya bashing nonsense?

> So titles are useful a great deal of the time, if only as a way to
> frame conversation in the early moments.

Yes, if only. But they can also, especially at this early stage,
really truly screw things up. You can't say they are good, but I'll
grant you that they are not all evil either, but somewhere more in the
middle.

> This isn't meant to diminish from your success, but I'm hoping to
> reiterate Donna's point which was NOT "lack of titles is bad."

Should I congratulate you on your incredible success based on your title?

Alex

-- 
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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