When Optus appoints a Chief Optimism Officer, activate your bulldust detector

Three days after the hack that compromised the identifying and banking data of millions of Australians, it occurred to Optus to do just that. With the poo hitting the propeller, it didn’t concoct some fancy title. It looked for a real, defined and delineated role: a senior manager in IT and cyber risk, whose primary responsibility is “to provide advice and support in all matters related to risk management”.

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For anyone with a memory reaching back a mere five years, this is all just a little bit of history repeating.

Just before the banking royal commission, ridiculous job titles and fashionable preoccupations had taken the banking world by storm. At one boardroom roundtable at the august Committee for Economic Development of Australia, I was presented with the business card of a chap claiming to be the head of “Thought Leadership & Insights (Corporate & Institutional Banking)” at National Australia Bank. That was in mid-2017.

In that same heady few months, Westpac announced with great fanfare that it had achieved gender parity in its upper ranks. But the Workplace Gender Equality Agency reported that the number of female executives (people with real power) at Westpac was stuck at under 30 per cent. It was soon revealed that the bank had fudged the numbers by bestowing female employees with a bunch of bulldust management roles, no doubt with inventive titles, prompting two UTS academics to ask whether the bank was “gender gerrymandering”. The banking sector was engulfed in a miasma of managerial guff.

Two months later, in the December of 2017, the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry was established. Hearing after hearing aired the substantial matters the banks should have been concentrating on while they were busy leading corporate and institutional thoughts. Basic things, like not charging dead people fees and preventing money laundering. Serving their customers well and preventing misuse of their services.

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As the royal commission progressed, the guffsters evaporated. Indeed, they have an odd knack of disappearing. I tried to look up the banking thought leader, only to find that he’d removed his profile from LinkedIn. I’m not in the business of ruining livelihoods, so I won’t reveal where I finally found him, but I am tickled to reveal he now runs an outfit with a name very similar to The Complication Emptiness, which claims something along the lines, “the emptiness of complication is the signature of intelligence”.

You and I know that public ineffectuals will rise again. Which is why we should be aware of the signs when they manifest, as they always clearly do. When a company begins to dream up fancy titles, run a mile. Start shopping around for a serious alternative to the unserious service provider wasting your money on corporate frippery. If you’re invested, divest – sell, sell, sell.

I can hardly keep track of how many bottom lines corporate governance is running on these days, but the bull’s bottom line is a key indicator we now all need to keep track of as well.