IT executive photo ops – size matters!
IT EXECUTIVE PHOTO OPS – SIZE MATTERS!
When it comes to technology, some executives are clearly better endowed than others.
When it comes to executive photo ops in the IT press, size clearly matters. Any in-depth article on the latest and greatest project success at Acme Inc will inevitably feature a photo of the senior IT or business executive in charge. But not just any old photo: the standard 1×1.5 inch mug shot is clearly inadequate here and doesn’t convey the right message. That message is all about size and importance, which means the person must be appropriately dwarfed by some technology, the implicit message being – hey, I run all this sh*t and make it work!
Technology is the only allowable backdrop for exec photo shots. Geography, scenery and tourist attractions just don’t make the grade, which explains why you hardly ever see exec photos with backdrops of city scenes or nature.
When it comes to technology, some executives are clearly better endowed than others. For example, you can expect great photos ops for execs working in companies which manufacture or use behemoths like airplanes, submarines or cruise ships. Most of these photos are taken outdoors, with awesome technology as the ultimate prop. I remember many years ago a photo of an exec who even managed to be photographed perched atop the cockpit canopy of an attack helicopter, with the rotor blades just above his head! That was a boy with one helluva toy!
For execs that are less well endowed technology-wise, all is not lost! The standard alternative is to fall back on the computer room filled with lots of exotic hardware. With suitable tricks of lighting and focus, photographers can put together indoor pictures that tell as impressive an executive story as those depicted by the outdoor pictures of the boys with their toys. The usual shot is to have the exec with arms folded leaning against a black mainframe or a huge array of disks. He is suitably stern-faced (no smiling in the computer room), with a Clint Eastwood look that seems to be saying ‘go on, make my day!’
When choosing props in the computer room though, I think these execs are not giving technology a fair deal, so the latest gadgets are getting a bum rap. After all, if we measure technological progress in terms of the accepted criteria of miniaturization (smaller, faster, cheaper), then execs should have been posing in the seventies with minicomputers, in the eighties with PCs, in the nineties with laptops, and today with handheld devices. But no, it’s always the bloody mainframe! And when they don’t have a mainframe, then it’s server or disk arrays, the next best look-alikes (hell, they could even pose in front of the air conditioning unit and we’d be none the wiser – they all look the same anyway)!
There is at least one sector however, where execs feel they never get any justice from the IT press when it comes to photos, and that is the lingerie business. And who can blame them? For example, at that household name of US lingerie, Victoria’s Secret, whatever the IT story, project success or failure, you can be sure that the magazine is going to run a photo of a model from the latest catalogue – or worse, the exec against a background of said model! Regardless of gender, it’s an exec loser’s game – for the man because he appears too feminine, and for the lady because she appears, well… too feminine.
So no matter how technology plays out over the next decade, I think most large companies will always have at least one mainframe in the computer room – it’s the only suitable prop for executives who are not well endowed! MG
