The accountancy/advisory giant EY have decided, in an effort to retain talent, to apply title inflation to all 679 Associate Partners, who from now on will all be known as Partners.

Inflating titles is an example of what I call perfectly solving the wrong problem. It seems like a straightforward solution and it’s relatively easy to implement.

The implementation can go well and for a short period of time, everyone seems happy.

Until they’re not.

Until you realise that you’ve upset the coherence in the system.

This happens in other organisational forms too and I regularly see it bunch-up the closer one gets to the C-suite.

Why does it happen and what are the implications?

That's what I explore in this episode of the podcast.