Public Entrepreneur

A public entrepreneur uses public funds (e.g. research grants) to create a start-up inside his lab preferably with a University mailing address (come on, even virtual start-ups can have some non-university address). Whereas a normal entrepreneur usually risks to end up with a pittance for working a couple of years on a start-up the public entrepreneur's worst outcome is that he is made fun of at my web site.

A recent example reached me by e-mail today announcing that SciVee (some myspace for researchers) won the third place (aka $10,000) in UCSD's Entrepreneur competition (second place were some MBA's). But let's focus on SciVee: At the bottom of the web site you will find the NSF logo which indicates that they might be working of a grant from the NSF. Next to it you see two other logos of public institutions. The mailing address (notice the mail code) is at UCSD and the people running it are tenured professors with some staff. Though this is wild speculation I am pretty sure they are also leeching of bandwith and servers from the University computing center (otherwise they would be hosting their videos on youtube:-) and/or are paying their staff from that grant.

I can understand the need for the NSF to fund a myspace for research and setting it up at some research institution. But I wopuld have preferred if it would have been a research project and instead of founders there should have been principal investigators. Assuming this is the case for SciVee calling it a start-up would be a big stretch. Keeping that assumption I am particularly disappointed about this competition handing out $10K to an already funded project -- and I will honor it with a new title the "Public Enterpreneur".

Chief Fun Officer

Usually after a while my niece says "adults are no fun" and similarly an Indian company thought that working is no fun -- enter the Chief Fun Officer or CFO. From the article:

"The CFO will be charge of all the fun and will not have to rack his brains with the usual pressures of the outsourcing industry. He has been entrusted with the responsibility of keeping employees happy. He will also be in charge of organizing office parties.[...]

The Chief Fun Officer will also be in charge of organizing weekend outings for the employees. The basic task of the CFO will be to keep the employees happy. During the week he will have to organize games and short parties for the staff. The idea is to provide frazzled employees with stress-busters. The fun includes dancing, singing, various competitions and games, et cetera."

Sounds like a fun job and hopefully a fun place to work -- if work is no fun anymore our CFO will get parachuted and replaced with a new CFO -- let the fun begin

MBA

"Bogged down for more than five months by a controversy surrounding a master’s degree improperly awarded to the governor’s daughter, the president of West Virginia University announced Friday that he would step down in September.
[...]
The controversy on campus began in late December after a reporter for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called to confirm the academic credentials that Mylan had listed for Ms. Bresch after her promotion to chief operating officer."

(Source: NYTimes)

Commentary: This again shows the importance of an MBA for somebody's career. Though I am not familiar with the circumstances I wouldn't be surprised that an MBA would have been a necessary credential to become COO - so she went to West Virginia University to get some. She probably didn't have time to do the necessary coursework so she got behind but the university awarded it anyway -- what went wrong? Ms. Bresch should have gone for a Harvard MBA (a title I will look at another time) and not wasted time on an inferior MBA - then she still would have her job...

Baby Engineer

Check out http://xkcd.com/441/ and you will see what I mean.

Everything can be engineered and everybody can be an engineer but baby engineer is kind of a novelty. But if you look closely what a reproductive specialist does you will find many parallels to the engineering discipline -- and baby engineer is one of the titles which tells you what the person does holding the title.

Missing Manual Editor

My grandfather in law swears on missing manuals for his eMac and if you have unpacked some Mac recently there usually is no manual at all. Other devices are the same and so in an entrepreneurial move O'Reilly picked up the task of delivering manual to the people so they could use the gadgets they deserve -- and with most gadgets made oversees it makes perfect sense to insource the manual production by outsourcing it to O'Reilly to avoid expensive and for the customer confusing translations of manuals which make perfect sense in their original language...

The latest addition "Your Brain: The Missing Manual" actually prompted this post. This really needs entrepreneurial spirit to extend from gadgets to everything without a manual -- now they are really on to something and I am waiting for the competition catching up with "My Brain for Dummies" and the "Idiot's guide on using your brain"

"Saftschubse"

After a short break we continue with our first international title of the day. "Saftschubse" is a German title which translated means "juice pusher" and is derogatory for stewardess. This title is actually a good example for a title which describes what people actually do -- which is pretty rare. Most often a title instead of describing what somebody does ornaments somebody and even makes dull jobs look pretty interesting (our previous title Food Transportation Engineer comes to mind)

The Title of the day team is taking a short break to collect new and even more interesting titles. We might be blogging on and off for the next ten days but return to our daily schedule on 6/24. Stay tuned!!

Online Cartographer

And here comes our second Web 2.0 title of the day: An online cartographer uses Google maps to essentially map trips, hiking tours, etc. (see an example here)

Senior online cartographers use special devices to upload images right from their camera to the Internet to create a map of their trip right as they go with annotated pictures. This allows their friends to see where they are right now --

The first kind is very useful Publish Postfor planning a trip -- see how it looks different places.

Live Historian

With WWDC going on right now we are putting the many people in the spot light who report on history right when it's made; the bloggers in the auditorium who deliver pictures and instant analysis to millions of people's web browsers -- the CNN reporters of the now.

On a related note twitter ,limited their service to make sure they could handle the WWDC blogging... this is really big and once you read it it will be small. History is moving so fast...

Chief Food Officer

I asked once a recruitment guy from Google "so, tell me more about the food" and the answer was around the lines "well, we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner... let me think yesterday we had bacon and eggs, baby back ribs..." anyway you will get the idea.

To keep all those meals coordinated you will need a Chief Food Officer or CFO and to show the importance of this position for the stock price Google let him present in one of the quarterly conference calls (here). Because this person is critical for the success of any company it made a big splash when he moved on to facebook:

"THE most telling indicator of the prospects of Silicon Valley's technology firms is now clear. It is the cooks. The insightful few on Wall Street who understood this in 1999 are now rich. That year, Google, which had just 40 employees at the time, held a cook-off to anoint its “chief food officer”. Charlie Ayers, who had once fed the Grateful Dead, won. Over the next six years, he led Google, which was also dabbling in web searches and online advertising, to dominance in its core competency: ample, free, organic and exotic food."

(Source: The Economist, "Poaching")

Piled higher and Deeper

or short PhD -- a title popularized by the entertaining PhD-Comics. This is a title which doesn't come with a job and can therefore be earned and used as long as you live. But be careful not all PhD are equal. A common distinction is between Tier 1, Tier 2 and even Tier 3 institutions. The third tier specializes in accredited distance-learning (derogatory "mail-order") PhD's for instance (an example institution here), whereas the second tier only qualifies you to teach in the third tier -- which means what you really want is a Tier 1 PhD.

Usually public (e.g. government) positions don't distinguish between the different tiers and just pay you more if you have any PhD -- but sometimes people don't even have the time and dedication to finish a mail order PhD so a fake-Phds from non-accredited institutions might come in handy. So from time to time you will read stories of high up government officials being outed as having no real PhD.

Food Transportation Engineer

AKA pizza delivery guy. One of my favorite blogs recently ran a story on this line of work -- which believe it or not is "the 4th most dangerous job category in America, right up there with fishermen, timber workers, and construction laborers."

Q

Q is an unofficial title used for the MIT trained gadget man of homeland security (see the NPR article here) There is a long history of using titles from movies in real live and vice versa. Q or "Quartermaster" is besides Bond the most interesting character in those movies (or do you care for M?) -- always blowing stuff up...

Press Release Grader

In an open organization you can't just have control over every press release. Some branch manager might want to release something to the local paper, somebody might have a blog, etc. -- so you can't control what gets released but for sure you can grade it. Better yet, have somebody on staff whose job is to grade press releases. And use the usual grading scale:

• A - overAchiever
  
• B - Better next time
• C - needs Counseling
• D - Demote
• F - Fire

If you don;t have the budget to have a professional grader or you are about to put something out there is always pressreleasegrader.com