Time of the title - Arrivals - companies use multiple executive titles - Brief Article

Chief Executive, The, May, 2002 by Sonja Sherwood

ACCENTURE JOINED THE multi-title trend in March with the promotion of seven divisional managers to group chief executives.

Group CEO titles went to Gregg Hartemayer in technology and outsourcing, Tim Breene in business consulting, Mark Foster in products operating, Bill Green in communications and high tech, David Hunter in government, Karl-Heinz Floether in financial services and Mary Tolan in resources.

For most, the nomenclature comes with no change in duties. The $11 billion, Chicago-based consulting and outsourcing firm explains that the new titles are "more relevant to the marketplace."

This is a change from the origin of the CEO title, which historically was conceived to resolve internal management issues.

The title goes back at least as far as the '50s, when a handful of companies, notably Ford and General Motors, first adopted it to make lines of authority clearer, according to Kathi Ann Brown, corporate historian in Charlottesville, Va.

Title inflation--the use of multiple CEO titles within a company--took off during the era of conglomerates in the '60s and '70s.

Robert Sobel, the late Hofstra professor and author, suggests an explanation in his book, ITT: The Management of Opportunity. He recounts how ITT'S CEO Lyman Hamilton, successor to the legendary Harold Geneen, conceived of naming a sub-CEO to each of the large entities under ITT's umbrella, partly because he felt the company was becoming too vast for a single CEO to manage and partly to head off antitrust crusades by a federal government itching to restrain conglomerates.