Three Titles Arrived Before the Job Did
Friday 9 October — Art of Leadership (II) · The school — a new role for its alumni
The table
The case
Subtitle: A fictional leadership case for discussion. It continues the story of the AI Office; all figures are illustrative planning assumptions, not benchmarks.
Three Envelopes and One Scar
Marta had three proposals on her desk and one MBA diploma on the wall behind her.
Lamora offered a Chief Transformation Navigator, two Navigators and a Navigation Analyst. Beutiful offered a Head of Applied Intelligence Experience whose experience, on closer reading, was eleven months. Fogi offered an AI Value Realisation Lead and a slide of value being realised, in a curve that began before the contract did.
Each firm would send its people into hers. Each team would need an induction. Each induction would be delivered by Marta.
The prices, illustrative and large, ran from Lamora's €280,000 for six months to Fogi's "outcome-based", which meant nobody could say.
She had seen this film. After the AI Office's first month, when HR, procurement and a second sales team wanted one, the founder had bought the expansion from Macrosoft instead of running Marta's starting package.
The Macrosoft team arrived with a methodology and left with a dashboard. They asked what a confirmed order was, which department owned margin, and whether the firm had a process for customer exceptions "or just people who know things".
They were not bad engineers. They lacked not only her firm's processes but elementary business-process knowledge — let alone MBA-level; Monday-morning level would have done. The project ended as such projects end in most firms: quietly, over budget, with nobody at fault.
Marta put the envelopes in a folder and labelled it "fog". The person they described already worked here. She was reading them.
The Translator Without a Title
Since the AI Office, Marta's job had drifted into something nobody had written down.
The founder asked her what could safely be automated; operations, why a draft promised what they could not deliver; the engineers, which of two disagreeing sources was true.
She had become the translator between the founder, the processes and the engineers — with no name, no pay grade and no mandate. When she told a department to fix its guidance, the department could politely decline.
The founder did not know what to call her, how to pay her or what she was allowed to decide.
The lead engineer had his own view. "She does not build anything. She goes to meetings and tells us what the business meant. That is a manager pretending to be part of the system."
Marta half agreed. She did not build. She answered.
The Recruiter Who Could Not Find Her
The founder asked a recruiter to benchmark the role. She returned after two weeks, puzzled.
Job boards had architects who design, product managers who ship and transformation leads who run programmes. Nobody advertised for the person who signs what AI may prepare and what a human must authorise, keeps the sources honest, reads the receipts and answers for the number on the P&L.
"I can find you three people who would say they do that," she said. "I cannot find one who has done it, and I cannot price a job with no title."
Marta had once written, at the top of a proposal, that every new team needs a business owner who is prepared to learn with it. The sentence had come back to her as a profession.
The Principal Remembers
At COTRUGLI, the principal remembered Marta from the COlab session where alumni had played customer and operations manager and broken her process on purpose.
Two alumni cases he had read that month — a title the rewards never followed, a vacancy no recruiter could fill — pointed at the same missing signature.
His case: the market buys categories, not people; an alumna with a recognised title negotiates from a position instead of from gratitude; and the school would have a product.
A working group proposed it: a name, a curriculum, a certificate and placement. Working name: Cotrugli AI Business Architect, CABA.
The dean of programmes liked the acronym and disliked the word. "Architect promises building. She does not build. She answers."
Someone proposed AI Business Orchestrator and was asked whether the alumni would then conduct; Chief Sense-Making Officer was sent outside for five minutes.
The Job Description Already Existed
The working group started not from the name but from the rules the AI Office had learned the hard way.
AI prepares. A person confirms every commitment. Every source has an owner. Errors are reported, not hidden. A fallback exists, and daily business never depends on the experiment.
Each rule already named an owner. Nobody had written whose signature sat on all five; that signature was the role.
The CABA would not design the model or write the integration; engineers do that. She would choose which problem deserves a system, which sources it may trust, where the human signature sits and which number on the P&L it must move. Then she would read the receipts and answer when the number did not.
The principal added a test. Nobody carries the title until she can show one system that runs and one number that moved — whatever the certificate says.
Marta would pass: one category of enquiries fourteen months in production, answers down from days to hours, thirty-one errors reported and examined, no commitment sent without a signature. Illustrative figures, and hers. Most of Lamora's Navigators would not.
The Case Against
The head of placement was not persuaded.
A category invented by one school can be ignored by the market. Lamora, Beutiful and Fogi have larger marketing budgets and no shame. A certificate might simply give the fog a diploma.
And who pays: the firm that gets the number, the alumna who gets the position, or the school that gets the product? If firms paid no premium, the certificate would be worth what Fogi's curve was worth.
The principal wrote down the two questions the school could not answer alone.
Will firms pay for a title a school invented?
What exactly must a CABA have delivered so that the title never becomes fog?
The Decision Before Zadar
The founder wanted an answer before Marta answered an envelope. The engineer wanted to know whether a certificate turned "what the business meant" into a mandate.
Marta wanted "to be paid for the job I already do, and to be allowed to say no to a department".
The school could create the category, or keep saying its people know how to do this and let the consultancies name it first. The principal brought the question to Zadar. The room decides.
The CDayZ Leadership Challenge
Act as the school's board, with the founder, the engineer and the recruiter as witnesses. Decide whether COTRUGLI creates the category and, if so, what a person must have delivered before carrying the title. Your proposal must state who pays, how the market is tested before the name is printed, and what happens to a title whose holder cannot show a running system and a moved number.
Discussion Questions
- Why did the Macrosoft project fail, and why does the room recognise it?
- What does Marta actually do that nobody has a name for?
- Should a business school invent a job category?
- What must a CABA have delivered before carrying the title?
- Who pays — the firm, the alumna or the school?
- What should the founder change on Monday, without waiting for the school?
- How would the school know within a year whether the category had failed?
- The NEO Turn. When agents on the NEO stack do the integration work, what of the role remains?
Separate missing knowledge of this firm from missing business knowledge, and decide which one a school can teach.
Describe the role by what she signs, keeps, reads and answers for, not by what she is called.
Weigh a negotiating position for alumni and a product for the school against a title the market can shrug at.
Define the running system and the moved number precisely enough to refuse someone, and say who verifies both.
Follow the money for curriculum, certificate and placement, and say who loses if the market shrugs.
Give Marta a pay grade, a mandate and a P&L number that carries her name.
Set the evidence: placements, pay premium, firms asking by name, certificates withdrawn.
Responsibility, choosing the problem and reading the receipts — the rail attests, never decides, so someone must sign.
A Lesson for the Next COTRUGLI Generation
The market will always sell a title before it can supply the person. A school's job is the reverse: supply the person, prove the delivery, and only then agree on the name. Marta did the work for a year before anyone knew what to call it. Whatever the room decides, the title should be the last thing she receives, not the first.
Your comment on this chapter
A question for the table, a disagreement, what you would have done. The case lead reads every comment; the ones the table takes up enter the chapter as questions from the room, with your name.