Leadership Quote by George McGovern

Titles are supposed to be shorthand for authority; McGovern flips them into evidence of insecurity. "The longer the title, the less important the job" lands because it names a pattern most people recognize but rarely say aloud: institutions pad language when they can't justify power in practice. A job that matters tends to be legible. A job that doesn't gets wrapped in syllables like bubble wrap, protected from scrutiny by abstraction.

McGovern, a politician who lived through war, reformist insurgency, and the managerial sprawl of late-20th-century government, had reasons to distrust ornamental status. His career put him near the places where decisions are made and also near the machinery built around those decisions: task forces, commissions, liaison offices, deputy assistants to the deputy assistant. The line reads as a populist jab at bureaucratic self-importance, but it's also a warning about organizational drift. When power is diffuse and accountability is murky, titles become compensation. They manufacture hierarchy in environments where actual influence is thin.

The subtext is moral as much as managerial: seriousness doesn't need marketing. McGovern isn't attacking expertise; he's attacking the performance of expertise, the way language can be used to launder ambition into something that sounds like service. In an era that keeps inventing new "chief" and "senior vice president" roles, the quip still stings because it indicts a culture that confuses naming with doing.