Paid in titles

A title is the cheapest thing a company can pay with, and in this region it buys more than it does in most places.

Look at almost any org chart in Riyadh, Dubai or Cairo and count the heads. Head of brand, head of growth, head of digital, head of partnerships, head of customer experience. Then count the people under each of them. A surprising number of heads have no team and no budget of their own. They have a word.

I used to read this as inflation and stop there. I have come to read it as a ledger.

Every one of those titles was a conversation. Somebody asked for money, for a second person, for a budget line that would let them do the thing the strategy deck said the company wanted. And somebody senior, who could not or would not release the money, reached for the one thing on the table that cost nothing. A promotion in name. Head of the thing, with no thing.

It works because of who the title is for. In the Gulf and in Egypt a title gets spent at home rather than at the office. It goes on the wedding invitation, into the conversation with the father-in-law, onto the card the aunt keeps in her handbag. It settles the question of whether a person has done well. A company that understands this can pay a real raise in a currency that costs it nothing, and it does, again and again, until the chart is full of heads.

So read the chart for the biggest title with the fewest reports. That is not where the company is investing. That is where somebody asked for the money and was given a word instead, and it is the exact place the strategy was declined.