CHAPTER 6
The Power of Names in the Workplace
From McDonald’s to Microsoft, countless corporations have discovered that using creative names delights employees and visitors, breaks the monotony of the daily grind, improves worker morale, and positively impacts the culture.
Online marketplace Etsy has conference rooms with names that are as crafty as the goods they sell. The employee-generated musician-food mash-up namesinclude Fleetwood Mac ’n’ Cheese, Oreo Speedwagon, Sushi and the Banshees, and Nine Inch Snails.
Harley Davidson gets extended mileage out of its street-smart ticker symbol: HOG.
Yahoo’s cybersecurity force is called The Paranoids. (Don’t tell them I told you—they’re paranoid.)
When calls of distress beckon at MapInfo Corp., the company brings in its self-titled Master of Disaster.
While progressive companies have readily embraced creativity around the office, conservative corporations especially can use a little levity to lighten the mood. Imagine if an insurance behemoth named its cafeteria Provisions.
Even if your “company cafeteria” is your kitchen table, you’ll be inspired by these examples of corporate creativity.
Meeting Room Names—Inspire Creativity Where It Happens
“We’re having a staff meeting in conference room 29A.” Snore. “We’re having a staff meeting in Pillow Fight.” I’ll bring donuts!
Pillow Fight is just one of the love-at-first-sight meeting room names at the headquarters of LinkedIn in San Francisco. It was inspired by the city’s annual Valentine’s Day flying feather fest on the nearby Embarcadero. LinkedIn’s novel theme of naming rooms after lively local events includes rooms named Bay to Breakers, SantaCon, Cherry Blossom, and How Weird. The latter is a sensational street fair where thousands of revelers in colorful costumes from around the world celebrate creativity and weirdness. Coincidentally, LinkedIn is smack in the epicenter of the event, on the corner of Second Street and How Weird, aka Howard Street.
Considering that most brainstorming happens in conference rooms, it’s only natural that you would give them innovative names.
A few blocks from LinkedIn is Riverbed Technology. When I worked with the company several years ago, I was charmed to see that conference rooms had fish names like Salmon and Trout. (I was relieved not to have to present names in Flounder. I’m not sure if that room exists or if they have a fish named Wanda.)
Groupon’s theme is “irreverent.” It wins the award for the kookiest names, including Crocodile Done Deal, Meet Locker, Elvis Is Alive in Here, Unlimited Salad and Breadsticks, This Used to be a Forest, and Organic Cageless GMO-Free Conference Room.
Mozilla, the company that makes Firefox, has meeting room names inspired by movies and comics. “Mozillans,” as they call themselves, can gather in exciting places like the Batcave, Thunderdome, Spider Skull Island, Death Star, and Mos Eisley Cantina, with the last two being especially cool for Star Wars fans.
If your conference room names are as exciting as cat hair, try names that bond employees over shared memories to bring joy and foster conversations. One company gives its meeting rooms the names of candy, and each is stocked with that treat. As you can imagine the Milky Way room is always booked, and the Starlight Peppermint room is usually vacant.
If you’re stuck for ideas of fun themes, here are a few freebies for you. I promise that if you try these, they will spark animated conversations with your coworkers and anyone visiting your office. When potential employees see them, they will speak volumes.
Childhood toys (Slinky, Magic 8 Ball, Lite-Brite, Furby, My Little Pony)
Iconic dances (Funky Chicken, Electric Slide, Watusi, Cha-Cha, Hokey-Pokey)
Tongue twisters (Stupid Superstition, Swizzle Scissors, Rural Juror, Three Free Throws, You Know New York)
Not sure if your office is ready for such a bold transformation? Try out new names by placing masking tape over the current ones. I think you’ll quickly find that giving your conference rooms exciting names can arouse the same enthusiasm as announcing, “There’s leftover pizza in 29A.”
Take Stock in the Value of Clever Ticker Symbols
Most companies don’t give a lot of thought to their ticker symbols, missing a tremendous opportunity to extend brand mileage. Before it was acquired by Mars, Veterinary Centers of America had the ticker symbol WOOF. Say it out loud. WOOF! You can’t help but smile. The same goes for Heineken’s symbol, HEINY. (Don’t say that one out loud if you are at the office.) DMC Global specializes in explosive metalworking. Its ticker symbol: BOOM.
It’s hard to be creative with a few letters, but some publicly traded companies have tickers that tickle. Some, such as JACK (Jack in the Box), YUM (Yum Brands), and GRUB (GrubHub), are even better than the name of the company. Others, like HOG (Harley-Davidson), are wonderfully clever. Here are a dozen more:
GRR (Asia Tigers Fund)
RACE (Ferrari)
BEN (Franklin Resources)
ROCK (Gibraltar Industries)
FAN (Global Wind Energy)
TAN (Invesco Solar)
MOO (VanEck Vectors Agribusiness)
ZEUS (Olympic Steel)
SAVE (Spirit Airlines)
FIZZ (National Beverage)
FUN (Cedar Fair)
Company Cafeterias—Cook Up Something Fun
Food and fun go together. There’s no reason why your company cafeteria can’t enjoy some “good humor.”
When I worked for Ogilvy & Mather, the cafeteria in its New York headquarters was named Hell’s Kitchen. Etsy has Eatsy. Dropbox workers dine at the Tuck Shop. Dropbox missed a terrific opportunity to extend the brand by calling its cafeteria Lunchbox, Breadbox, or Box Lunch. (Even if it serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Lunchbox and Box Lunch still work as names because they make people smile throughout the day.)
Workday has an appetite for creativity and serves meals at the Cloud Café, Byte Café, and Data Diner, where employees can be seen wearing legendary company T-shirts, including the classic “Kicking SaaS and taking names.”
If you don’t have a name for your corporate cafeteria, or it’s simply called The Café, try something with more personality like The Dish, Chop-Chop, or Dine & Dash. (Of course, use the last one only if the food is free.)
In-House Creative Agencies—Let Them Brand Themselves
Every internal ad agency should be branded with a name that reflects the creativity of the people who produce the work. Think of how much more pride a bank employee would have if they could say, for instance, that they worked not in Creative Services but at the firm’s agency, Coinage, The Mint, or Clambake.
The in-house creative department at McDonald’s is called Agency 123. This is not an ode to the Dollar Menu but to Pantone number 123, the signature color of the iconic golden arches. Here’s how a few in-house agencies use creative names to distinguish themselves from the rest of the company:
96 Octane (Progressive Insurance)
Agency Inside (Intel)
The Cooler (Experian)
Green Dot Agency (Deloitte)
Torque Creative (Techtronic Industries North America)
Yellow Tag Productions (Best Buy)
My favorite name for an in-house creative services firm is that of Disney’s internal agency, Yellow Shoes. It is of course named after—you guessed it—the favored footwear of Mickey Mouse.
Clever Club Names—Team Up for Fun
Many companies extend their brands with clever names for softball teams, social groups, and employee clubs. Some of the most creative names I’ve seen are for corporate Toastmasters clubs. Toastmasters is an international organization that helps people become better leaders and speakers. There are hundreds of corporate Toastmasters clubs, many with imaginative names that will inspire you to be more creative when naming any company club or team. Here are a dozen names worth raising a toast to:
Sit, Stay, Speak (Bayer Animal Health)
Electric Toasters (Pacific Gas and Electric)
Motor Mouths (Toyota Motor Sales)
Flying Toasters (Panasonic Avionics Corporation)
Toastmodernists (San Francisco MOMA)
Dolby Speakers (Dolby)
Federal Expressions (FedEx)
Sweet Talkers (Abbott Diabetes Care)
Lettuce Speak (Dole Fresh Vegetables)
Money Talks (Federal Reserve Bank)
Talking Heads of State (U.S. State Dept.)
Toast on Tap (MillerCoors, Milwaukee)
Meaningful Job Titles—Celebrate Contributions
At Microsoft a researcher reportedly held the title of Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence. Berkshire Hathaway employs a Director of Chaos. Matrix Group’s leader uses the title of CEO & Chief Troublemaker.
Of course playful and over-the-top titles aren’t for everyone. Can you imagine if the CEO of McDonald’s had the title of Lord of the Fries?
Some employees may shun a creative title because they feel it diminishes the seriousness of what they do or the level they have achieved in their careers. Or they might simply be embarrassed to introduce themselves as a Software Ninjaneer, Grand Poobah of Profits, or Wizard of Wingnuts.
That said, creative job titles can be tremendously beneficial for employees who desire them, especially if they feel the title they currently have doesn’t effectively convey the contributions they make to the company. Imaginative titles can make even the driest positions sound more interesting. They can instill a sense of pride and have meaningful implications, both on and off the job.
A paper published in the Academy of Management Journal shows self-reflective job titles can be important vehicles for identity expression and reducing emotional exhaustion among stressed-out employees.* I learned about the study from Wharton professor Adam Grant, who led the research. (You may know of Adam from his bestsellers Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, and Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, coauthored with Sheryl Sandberg.)
The job titles study focused on a midwestern chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. As you can imagine, the day-to-day stress of working with children who have life threatening illnesses is heartbreaking and takes a tremendous emotional toll.
Make-A-Wish executives, inspired that Disney calls its park workers “cast members” and lets them create their own job titles, decided to experiment with letting their employees invent their own titles. Like Disney, Make-A-Wish saw an opportunity to let members of the organization have the freedom to describe their unique values, identities, personalities, and talents.
To align with the Make-A-Wish mission of bringing joy, the CEO deliberately selected a title for herself that would make people smile—Fairy Godmother of Wishes. Others took the same lighthearted approach with titles such as Magic Messenger and Heralder of Happy News (PR managers), Wizardess of Wishes and Merry Memory Maker (wish managers), and King of Cashola (CFO). Employees received business cards featuring their new titles alongside their formal titles.
The results of the study were overwhelmingly positive. About 85 percent of the employees interviewed said the new title helped them cope with the emotional exhaustion of the job, helping them focus on the joy as opposed to the hardship.
Read the following remarks from study participants as if employees of your own company had said them. They make a strong case for having a self-reflective job title:
“It allows … people to feel comfortable with each other. There is not really a hierarchy of staff and we are all on the same plane … that removes some pressures…. I just think it allows you more freedom to speak up and not be intimidated by the leadership. You feel more like an equal and that your voice is valued. We are much more willing to listen to each other.”
“It lightens up the seriousness of our work.”
“It makes you want to come in to work … If [the titles] didn’t happen, we wouldn’t know each other as well. I don’t think it would be as personal for some people.”
“I feel special when people see the name; I love being introduced as that. Makes you feel a lot of pride and joy.”*
Relieving job stress, alleviating pressure, improving relationships, and smiling more are things from which we could all benefit.
The Make-A-Wish titles are the gold standard. They are meaningful and uplifting without getting carried away. Keep that in mind when choosing your own title, Captain Moonshot. Beyond changing your job title, if you’re considering changing the name of your brand, be sure to read the next chapter. Otherwise, skip to the final chapter, Name Review.
* Adam M. Grant, Justin M. Berg, and Daniel M. Cable, “Job Titles as Identity Badges: How Self-Reflective Titles Can Reduce Emotional Exhaustion,” Academy of Management Journal 57, no. 4 (2013).
* Grant, Berg, and Cable, “Job Titles as Identity Badges.”