Last weekend I was having trouble sleeping and somehow thought about czars and czarinas, so I started to read about them again. That led me into the typical rabbit hole I was expecting at first, but then I came across an unexpected other meaning:

a person appointed by government to advise on and coordinate policy in a particular area

I mean, I guess I’d heard of a “drug czar” before, but I never really thought it was a legitimate title! These folks are appointed by the executive branch and sometimes even undergo Senate confirmation. That’s pretty official.

In the US, we have not just drug czars, but also intelligence czar, terrorism czar, cyber security czar, and even war czar (according to Wikipedia). It’s sort of fuzzy how and why they came to be, but it’s definitely an established practice to have these folks who have a topical focus but may be restrained by resources.

At work, we decided this would be fun to adopt, so I dubbed myself the business czar, which my colleagues quickly turned into a hilarious pun: the biz-czar (sounds like bizarre, haha). I decided our head of IT should be the tech czar and our boss could be the tsar czar. What do you think?