What's in a name? A lot more power than you think

If we accept the way people look affects their careers, then it isn’t unreasonable to think their names do too

WHENEVER I used to hear that someone had saddled a son with a name like Tarquin, Apollo or Silas, I always feared that the child would be teased at school. I now find I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. The real damage done by an outlandish name doesn’t happen in the playground but in the boardroom.

LinkedIn has just consulted its database of 100 million professionals and found that chief executives overwhelmingly have boring first names. When it comes to the corner office, Ed will do nicely but Tarquin will not do at all: the most popular CEO names are Peter, Bob, Jack, Bruce and Fred.

I wonder that I have never noticed this before. If I trawl my mind for the names of the most remarkable corporate titans, they all have unremarkable, monosyllabic first names - Bill (Gates), Paul (Allen), Jack (Welch), John (Chambers). If they were born with longer names, they make them shorter: Jeffrey becomes Jeff (Immelt); Robert becomes Bob (Nardelli, Horton); and Christopher becomes Chris (Gent).

Two syllables are only really acceptable when they are a cute version of a more formal name. There is Jamie (Dimon), Sandy (Weill), Larry (Bossidy). But three syllables are not acceptable at all. I can’t think of a single famous boss in the US or UK with a long first name. Even less can I think of one with a flamboyant or weird one. The only mad name that sticks in my mind is Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, the disgraced former head of Elf. But he doesn’t really count as he is (a) French and (b) has spent rather a long time in prison.

The LinkedIn research suggests different sorts of corporate jobs attract people with different names. If you have a cheery-chappy name such as Budd or Troy or Chip, then you will do well in sales, while a longer, straighter name such as Andrew will make you a perfect engineer. If, however, your name has seven or more letters, corporate life isn’t right for you at all. You should open a restaurant instead.

This idea – that your name shapes your career – passes under the name of “nominative determinism”. One of its supporters is the journalist David Brooks, who has dredged up the peculiar fact that people called Dennis are more likely than most to end up as dentists, while people called Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers. We want, he says, to do things that sound like us. I’ve often marvelled at how this idea works negatively: financial villains tend to have dodgy names – think of Madoff or Fuld, for example.

When I was at school, I thought such things a tremendous joke. “Have you read Great Falls by Eileen Dover?” I’d ask, and then scream with laughter. But real life turns out to be funnier than childish jokes: there was an article written on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol 49, pp173-176, 1977) by JW Splatt and D Weedon.

Though the statistical evidence for nominative determinism may be a bit flaky, it figures. If we accept that the way people look affects their careers, then it isn’t unreasonable to think their names do too.

However, in the case of chief executives, what the Bob-Bill-Jack ascendancy tells us about corporate life is rather depressing. It says that diversity is bunkum: B-B-J puts foreigners at a clear disadvantage. Indeed, if you are born Gróf András István, but fancy running a big semiconductor company in the US, then you would be well advised to change your name to Andy Grove instead.

Indeed, the standard management guff tells us that the people who get ahead are the ones that are “unique” and “authentic”. Yet B-B-J shows this to be nonsense – if you want to get on, you need to sound and seem as unremarkable as everyone else.

B-B-J is evidence of a pervasive corporate lie. We are led to think that CEOs are friendly, when in fact it is their job to make people do things they don’t want to do and then fire them if they are not up to scratch. The matey little names – that seem to say “let’s have a couple of beers” – hoodwink us into thinking otherwise.

Finally, B-B-J tells us that it’s different for girls. The women CEOs on LinkedIn aren’t called Sue and Jill and Beth. They are Cynthia, Deborah and Carolyn; like my own CEO, Marjorie Scardino, they choose to use all three glorious syllables. Their names aren’t saying “let’s have a beer” but something more honest, if a bit more desperate: “Take me seriously.”

People often say that there will only be equality at the top when there are as many incompetent women CEOs as there are incompetent men. I’ve got another measure. Equality will be with us only when our female leaders ask to be called Debs and Marge. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011