All women marry beneath them. Eighty per cent of success is showing up. Ninety per cent of everything is crud. The quality of food in restaurants is in inverse proportion to the number of signed celebrity photographs on the wall...

These pearls of wisdom come courtesy of an entertaining new book, The Unwritten Laws of Life: Unofficial Rules as Handed Down by Murphy and Other Sages, by Hugh Rawson. However, if I had to pick my single favourite rule from the collection of more than 500 axioms, it would be the so-called McGovern's Law, which states that the longer the title, the less important the job.

George McGovern, the former US senator who was to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, apparently made the sweeping generalisation in 1960, when John F. Kennedy sought to persuade him that the post of “Director of the Food for Peace Program” was more important than that of “Secretary of Agriculture”. With a few exceptions, McGovern's Law is still true.

“Presidents” are more important than “vice-presidents”, “generals” order “lieutenant-generals” about, “deputy business editors” have sway over “deputy business news editors”, and given that I don't have a job title at all, the theory confirms the suspicion I've long harboured that I am in fact the most important person in the world.

However, most laws have qualifications, and if allowed to expound upon McGovern's axiom, I would add the following caveats:

(1) Some titles mean nothing, while others mean the opposite of what they say. In the former group you could put any title featuring the words “consultant”, “executive”, “assistant”, “associate”, “co-ordinator”, “director”, “technician” and “vice-president”, while the best illustration of those meaning the opposite of what they say is probably the phrase “special projects”. Special projects are hardly ever special. They're invariably extraneous tasks that no one else wants to do or be associated with.

(2) The more boring a profession, the fancier the job titles. Most rock bands have a singer, a drummer, a bassist, a guitarist and a keyboard player, but rarely anything else - unless the spoons are an important part of their sound. Titles in the equally glitzy sphere of film are similarly basic: actor, producer, writer, etc. In contrast, everyone in the not-so-scintillating sphere of information technology seems to have a different job title. Indeed, a 2005 study of three million employees discovered that while there are about 141,000 unique job titles in different business departments across the UK, the US and Europe, the IT sector alone accounted for 60,000 of them - by far the biggest portion.

(3) The seniority of any job is inversely proportional to the effort that goes into coming up with the job title. If you think about it, labels at the top are pretty predictable. Apart from Steve Jobs, at Apple, who rather annoyingly calls himself “chief know-it-all”, and the head of the toy company Build-A-Bear, who answers to “chief executive bear”, titles such as “chief executive”, “managing director”, “finance director”, “chairman” and, come to think of it, “God”, have remained unchallenged for decades.

At the other end the tinkering is endless, with caretakers being renamed “maintenance engineers”, cleaners “environmental services engineers”, window cleaners “vision clearance engineers”, chimney sweeps “flueologists”, shelf-stackers “stock replenishment advisers”, and receptionists “heads of verbal communications” and “directors of first impressions”. Though ...

(4) ... the single most tinkered-with job title is “secretary”. As with many of the above posts, this is probably because the job is essential but badly paid, and managers, probably because their own positions are central to their self-esteem, believe that fancy titles are a way of keeping staff motivated without paying them more. Nevertheless, the number of euphemisms for the job is staggering. In 2005, the International Association of Administrative Professionals, formerly the US National Secretaries Association, said it had more than 500 job titles under its umbrella, ranging from “front desk co-ordinator” to “specialised medical secretary”, “office supervisor” and “junior administrative assistant”.

(5) The amount of time that someone spends campaigning for an impressive-sounding job title is inversely proportional to the title's usefulness. The fact is that most job labels have more to do with the job you will take next, than with the one you do: it's all about CV building. In reality, titles are a bit like degree classifications: you rarely refer to them once you have them. If people put as much effort into crafting clear job descriptions, around which so many tedious workplace disputes revolve, the working world would be infinitely happier.

(6) There is a directly proportional relationship between actual inflation and job-title inflation. Research suggests that companies particularly resort to dishing out grandiose job titles - so-called uptitling - as proxies for salary rises when economic times get tough. That may sound worrying because times are already tough and recruitment specialists have predicted that the next generation of titles will include preposterous phrases such as “chief cheerleader”, “chief inspiration officer”, “director of decisions”, “champion”, “czar”, “guru”, “chief listener”, “sustainability officer”, “director of mind and mood”, “chief imagination officer”, “visualiser” and “fearless leader”. Some specialists have even predicted that it will increasingly be acceptable for people to have two titles and for people to change titles much more frequently.

But I don't think we should fret. My forecast is that in coming years, the trend, if anything, will be for people to have no job titles at all. There are several reasons. First, the sillier and more superfluous job titles get, the less people will want them. Secondly, the idea of no titles tallies with the corporate myth that employees are all equally important. Thirdly, there is Bohr's Law, another axiom cited in The Unwritten Laws of Life. It says that the crazier the theory, the more likely it is to be correct.

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