Call meJeffrey

I’m likely not the best chief creative officer there is. In truth, I’m a little unclear as to what a chief creative officer really does in a normal company, though I have a pretty good idea. When I worked at an ad agency, pretty much everyone from creative director on up shuffled paper for a living. I assure you, I’m no paper-shuffler.

I’m fully aware of the fact that I’m one of the people at the front of an enormously successful company who got the opportunity to be there by simply being in the right place at the right time. Not to discount the work I’ve done, what I’ve been able to achieve or who I’ve become professionally, but the reality is that the only reason that I have the title I have is because it’s the title I took.

In reality, I’m not sure you could really give me a title. This goes for a lot of the people at our company. If we tried, our business cards would have to come with an index. Beyond the fact that a lof of us wear many hats, I also feel that some of the original employees of Threadless that have large titles also deal with the reality that if we left Threadless, our title would not be indicative of our skill-set and experience level.

The good news for many companies is that as you grow, the aforementioned situation becomes less the norm, as people are hired to fill specific roles – people who are qualified to fill these roles, regardless of where. For Threadless, as our company gets older, the need to hire specific people to handle specific tasks, rather than every task being a group effort increases. While I love the period of time that we were scrappy as hell, I think this is an important step in the growth of any company – to bring in highly skilled people for specific areas of your company where expertise is needed. This creates a mixture of your core culture with the ability to maintain the growth of your business. I’ve said it before, good businesses are run by people who are aware of their own shortcomings.

So what does this all mean? While the question of “could I actually go fill the role my title represents at another company?” is certainly a bit frightening, there’s comfort in the fact that (1) the business landscape is changing and people are more and more being measured by the results they deliver, not the title on their business card; and (2) clearly I’m not alone in these thoughts.

The type of companies that are grabbing headlines and having their founders and executives smiling on the covers of magazines these days are the type of companies that likely started out as hobby businesses (like Threadless). When you have a project that goes from taking up a desk’s worth of space in your dorm room to being a full-on company generating the type of income that could pay the tuition of every kid at your college, you’re likely going to find yourself catapulted into a position that is realistically a giant mismatch with your current level of experience.

That isn’t to say that someone couldn’t rise to the challenge of the position they’ve landed in (as we have), but what it realistically means is that they’ll fill the position in a manor that’s hyper-tailored to their specific company creating a highly specialized skill-set. In other words, the more that companies like these become the example of modern businesses, the less important a title will become.

Therein lies the double-edged sword. The less important a title becomes, and the more it merely becomes an identifier – specific to a company – of “the right person to talk to” in an organization, the harder it will be for people who have practiced old-school business and are able to hold down jobs simply by hiding behind the highest title they’ve achieved in their career.

I’d love for this change to happen, and completely overhaul the way people think about roles and responsibilities. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I approach my 30th birthday at the end of the month. In my early 20s I couldn’t wait to be 30. This was driven mostly by the fact that when I began my own company when I was 21, people were more interested in judging me by (1) how long I’d been in business, (2) what positions I had held previous to starting my own company, and (3) my age. No one seemed to be concerned with the results that I could deliver, at least not right off the bat. I found this to be frustrating, and very telling that a changing of the tides would be on it’s way as more people like myself were starting small businesses and could easily compete with “the big boys”.

It makes me excited to see that we’re heading into a newer business climate where the only thing that really matters is results, and it’s less important who is behind those results. As I roll into my dirty thirties, I’m happy to be part of a new business generation that will rarely judge someone by their age or experience level, and base their evaluating solely on skill and the ability to produce results.

These are great times for the young, smart and driven to make noise and create a serious impact on the burgeoning new business world.