Too many chiefs [Technically Speaking]

learned recently that a firm called AllOut Marketing has a new kind of CEO: a chief energizing officer. I have no idea what the poor guy who holds this position actually does all day, but it sounds as though it involves a pink bunny suit and a drum. This got me to thinking about, of all things, “lion food.” This phrase comes from the old joke about two lions who escape from the zoo and split up to increase their chances for survival. When they meet again a couple of months later, one is emaciated and the other is overweight. The skinny lion complains that he was able to eat just a single human being before being chased and harassed to the point where he could now only catch the occasional mouse or squirrel. The fat lion replies: “Well, I hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!” Lion food has therefore become a cheeky shorthand for the apparently inexhaustible supply of managers and administrators that make up the soft middle of many major corporations. But now it seems as though we have a new supply of lion food: the CXO— C for chief, X for a noun/verb/adjective designation, and O for officer—known collectively as the C-level or C-suite. The extent of this C-craze goes way beyond the usual collection of CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, and CTO. (And let’s not forget the SheEO: an unforgivably bad pun for a female CEO.) The new wave of CXO titles ranges from chief awareness officer (employed at, among other companies, Guardent and Marks & Spencer) to chief zoom officer (from Zoom Culture, a new media company), and others are sprouting up as fast as the consultants can suggest them. My research turned up over 200 C titles, and I would have found more but, luckily, I remembered I had a life. In technology alone, I found a few dozen different CXOs,