Diplomatic Immunity

Diplomatic Immunity

We were a small team responsible for delivering a discovery engagement on a consulting project for a global telecom client. Understaffed by design, high-stakes by definition. The kind of project where if you do not deliver the first time there is no second conversation. Kash was the Senior Vice President. The kind of title that makes junior colleagues straighten up when he walked in and makes clients assume the adults have arrived. What his CV promised and what he delivered were separated by exactly three weeks of excuses and a corner office nobody questioned.

When I finally called it, he said, 'This work is below my pay grade.'

I noticed something before I had processed what it meant. He looked relieved when he said it. Not defensive, not embarrassed. Relieved. He had been waiting for a sentence that would formally excuse him from the work. His title gave him diplomatic immunity: not a description of what he was capable of, but a blanket protection from ever being asked to prove it.

That is the thing the management books do not quite tell you. It is not that people misunderstand the relationship between titles and leadership. It is that titles have a second function nobody advertises: they are a ready-made exit from the moment things get difficult. And the people most likely to use them that way are the ones with the most impressive-looking titles, because they have the most to protect.

Why does the system keep minting titles nobody believes in?

Because the system finds ambiguity useful. Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson observe in Venture Deals that partner titles in venture capital are often cosmetic, deployed to blur the lines between general partners and everyone else, with firms layering on "executive managing director" and similar prefixes as pure status signals. David Graeber documents in Bullshit Jobs (2018) that as technology automated productive work, professional and managerial roles exploded into the space it left, creating entire strata whose primary function is to justify the strata above them. Steve Blank and Bob Dorf make the startup version of this point in The Startup Owner's Manual: conventional roles simply do not map onto what actually needs to happen. The title is not describing a job. It is describing a position in a hierarchy that has its own logic, entirely independent of the work.

This matters because it means Kash was not an aberration. He was doing exactly what the system had trained him to do. Over a long enough career inside a large enough organisation, seniority becomes identity, and identity becomes a thing you defend. Nobody had told him the rooms were about to change.

You already know the title is empty. What are you waiting for?

Naval Ravikant argues in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant that the best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed: they are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets. This is true at the level of the individual. At the level of the organisation it has never been true. Spend enough time inside large consulting firms, banks, or any institution old enough to have a formal org chart, and you will notice that the roles with the most elaborate titles tend to outlast the people who actually do things. The system does not reward contribution. It rewards the appearance of indispensability. These are not contradictory observations. They describe the same landscape from different altitudes.

The asymmetry is what matters. The people who internalised Naval's position early, who built their identity around contribution rather than credential, move through role changes because their value is not stored in a job title. The people who never got that memo are Kash. What looks like a philosophical question about whether titles matter is actually a timing question. The longer you wait to separate your identity from your job description, the more expensive the separation becomes.

The person who lost most wasn't Kash. Not immediately.

I brought in Stella. No domain knowledge, no title to protect, no vocabulary for excusing herself from the hard parts. Within the first week she had mapped the client's internal stakeholder tensions in a way Kash had refused to for three. She made the project work. The team ran leaner, the operating margin improved, and the mandate I set after that engagement has shaped every team I have built since.

Kash was fired not long after. What interests me now is where he is. He is one of the senior professionals finding, in this market, that the credential which once opened doors has become the thing interviewers read twice. Not because he lacks experience. Because his experience is stored in a format the market is no longer accepting. He used his title to avoid the work that would have kept him current. The title was not protecting him. It was making him obsolete on his behalf, quietly, while he thought it was keeping him safe.

In distance running, the pacer's job is to disappear before the finish line. They set the conditions, hold the tempo, do the work that makes someone else's performance possible, then step off the course without a medal. The best pacers are not bitter about this. They have understood, in their bodies before they understood it in their heads, that contribution and recognition are different currencies, and that grabbing for one mid-race costs you both. Kash had confused the currencies. He thought the medal was already around his neck. When the race required him to actually run, he performed like someone who, if he had not stopped training entirely, had at least stopped believing training was still required of him.

The strongest counter-argument is that titles serve a real coordination function. In large organisations, knowing who holds authority over what is not vanity. It is operational infrastructure. Remove the titles and you do not get a meritocracy. You get a renegotiation of every decision, a diffusion of accountability, and the organisational equivalent of a relay race where nobody has been assigned the baton order.

This deserves to be held at full strength, because it is correct about large organisations as currently designed. Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, has spent decades studying what actually happens inside those title hierarchies. In The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2018), she documents that title structures are among the primary suppressors of psychological safety: the condition under which teams surface problems, share information, and perform at their actual capability. The coordination function is real. The cost of that coordination, in suppressed contribution from everyone below the top of the hierarchy, is equally real. The question is not whether titles provide structure. It is whether the structure is worth what it quietly costs.

A title is a contract between a person and a system, and the clause nobody reads is the one that says: in exchange for this credential, you will gradually stop doing the thing that made you worth credentialing in the first place. The system finds this arrangement useful because people who have stopped doing the work are easier to manage than people who are still doing it. Kash said the work was below his pay grade, looked relieved, and in that moment handed the project, the operating margin, and eventually his own career to a woman who had never heard of his title and did not care.