CEO, CFO and other acronyms to dodge if you want to avoid adoring Anubis

Following on from the ravings reflections on borrowing words from other languages...

by The Prophet — 2026-01-15

In Italy, working for yourself starts with opening a partita IVA, a VAT registration that turns you into a sole trader. It comes with its own income tax, social-security contributions and a considerable amount of paperwork. Italian business talk has also filled up with English titles and acronyms, which is the other target of this piece.

1 Let us begin with a lovely fairy tale:

2 “Once upon a time there was a person who wanted to work for himself.

3 He registered as self-employed and, if he worked hard and well, he earned his bit of money.

4 At some point he could even decide to reinvest in his business.

5 He could also, if he thought it wise, ask a bank for a loan.

6 The bank manager, having weighed things up, could decide whether or not to grant it.

7 Once the business had grown to a certain point, with investment in premises and a fair number of employees, he could proudly call himself the director of his company.

8 Much later on, he might even decide to look for partners and investors, or to float it on the stock exchange.”

9 That has stayed a fairy tale... those were other times. Today, going self-employed in Italy means being ruined by taxes; investing in your own business means burning through all of grandpa's money and adoring Anubis for the rest of your life.

10 The state fights you every step of the way, and if you are lucky and, despite everything, manage to work and earn something, you have to hand it all over to the state.

11 What leaves you most puzzled, though, is that you can no longer even try to “do a job”; you have to “launch a start-up”!

12 No, it is not a breakfast cereal... apparently it means “innovative enterprise in its development phase”.

13 If, on the other hand, you open a conservative enterprise in its envelopment phase, then it is not a start-up.

14 Anuuubis!

15 Anyway, as we were saying, if you decide to work with a few friends on a project, you open the “Start-up”.

16 At this point you are not just someone working on a project, no... you have to be the CEO, and your friend (your right-hand man) becomes the COO (no, not the noise pigeons make).

• You don't need a bookkeeper, you need a CFO.
• You don't even need anyone actually working on the project, there's the CTO.
• Nobody handles the marketing strategy any more, there's the CMO.
• Whoever knows the most about computers and looks after the PCs becomes the CIO.

But who the fuck does the work if they're all bosses?

17 Dunno, it probably doesn't matter any more.

18 What matters is chattering away in jargon.

19 The Prophet has seen plenty of people offered the role of CEO or CFO with a handsome salary.

20 He asked some of them: "Do you have a precise understanding of the legal, criminal and civil liabilities of the role you have been offered?"

21 The answer was no, and many ended up in court or had to make brief getaways; at any rate, they all ended up on the street.

22 Whoever offered them the “great opportunity” ran off with the money and they ended up in the shit.

23 Remember: “if you can't spot the sucker at the table, the sucker is you”.

24 Perhaps if they had offered you the post of “finance director, also acting as auditor, who is of course responsible for drawing up the financial statements and must of course know every regulation in force”, you would have adored Anubis and run for it, or you would have answered: “If you like, I'll come and be your bookkeeper, your mother can be the CFO, and if you insist I'll start screaming Anubistic adorations.”

25 Or else you work for twenty years, and once you have real experience, enough to understand what you are getting yourself into, you can do it, after carefully weighing the risks.

26 Oh well, let's get back to your “start-up launch”.

27 It starts with hunting for money.

28 If you are a crook, you run a fundraising campaign, pretend to work, then bin your project/product and shut down.

29 You've sucked up a pile of money, and up yours, investors.

30 Alternatively, a credible investor turns up and gives you a bit of publicity (pardon me... “builds hype”), which lets you pull in other small investors.

31 Later the main investor cashes out with a profit (for him), leaving you and the small investors in the shit, and they may well take you to court too.

32 Let's suppose things go well and you actually manage to start working for real... it is not enough.

33 Real competition is not based on talent but on the quantity of resources.

34 You dream of a “horn on your forehead”, but bear in mind that the so-called “unicorns” have enjoyed, and still enjoy, valuations that make no sense at all compared with the real wealth they produce.

35 For years they were nothing but furnaces for capital, with no sense to them at all; then they won the battle, but not because they were the “best”.

36 The battle is not about being the best but about being able to burn more money than the others for longer.

37 We are not talking about production, we are talking about finance.

38 What do you know about finance? Not much? Bad!

39 Because that is what will decide your fate.

40 So do one thing and do it well: open your little business, obviously somewhere the state is not against you, run it as best you can, talk like a normal human being, and when grandpa's money runs out, close it.

41 At least you won't end up in jail.

42 If you really want to burn through grandpa's money, it would be more Anubistic to spend it on rum; not to work like a brute so you can give it away to the state.

43 This busting of the spheres is not meant to say don't work for yourself, but to do it fully aware of your own abilities and of the risks you run.

44 If you can, speak plain language, because even then it is very hard to understand what kind of mess you are getting into.

45 If you can't, go ahead and speak the jargon, but study carefully what liabilities are hiding behind those little letters.

46 Sadly, the business landscape, at the mercy of inflation, poor returns and too much state interference, is a sorry sight.

47 If we add unpredictable geopolitical problems, unpredictable because deliberately caused by the “usual suspects”, to the dependence on finance, it becomes even clearer that talking about the return on capital invested (pardon me... these days we say ROI) is a pipe dream.

48 Now, granted that investing in a business is something to weigh with the greatest caution and an Anubistic eye, how can the good worshipper of Anubis defend himself?

49 Do fuck all?

50 No!

51 That is what the Dim Souls do, preferably while blaming the State.

52 The good Anubist invests in himself instead of investing in a company.

53 There is only one thing that neither the state nor finance can ever steal or destroy: your own knowledge.

54 Don't kid yourself with cool acronyms, or with investments where, come the balance sheet, you will only be screwing away your capital.

55 Invest in yourself.

56 When you have to run for it, nobody can charge you duty on what you know: your knowledge cannot be taxed.

57 “Invest in yourself” is a simplification, because the Prophet is not playing the old windbag telling you to go and get one or more bits of paper: it is clear to anyone that they are useless.

58 Investing in yourself means using the scarcest resource we have (time) to develop knowledge.

59 If, among other things, you learn to play the bagpipes, adoring Anubis all the while, a thief without a uniform could steal your bagpipes, a thief in uniform could confiscate them, but nobody can ever make you forget how to play the bagpipes.

60 Bagpipes aside, everything you learn to do will remain yours alone.

61 It does not matter what you decide to invest your time in; obviously a good Anubist will favour knowledge that can guarantee him a living, but in a good balance with the kind that gives him the “pleasure of knowing”.

62 You might be amazed at how, in life, you end up, in spite of your three degrees, getting rich thanks to your bagpipe concerts. (It is not a joke; passion can very often take you further than your “professionalism”.)

63 The point is to develop knowledge, skill and the ability to get on with people (knowing, knowing how, knowing how to be).

64 Everything you know and know how to do, necessarily including your hobbies, will build the most important company of all, which is you.

65 No need for any title, inedible acronyms or grandpa's money.

66 You are more than enough.

67 You are the container of everything you need to produce wealth, and much more besides.

68 Being yourself does not require acronyms, it requires knowledge. Chase knowledge and you will have success, which, in Anubistic terms, does not mean being a rich Bill-dickhead who invests in vaccinating the planet, but being someone able to match their demands to their productive capacity while respecting the second precept, which, let us remember, is not to bust anyone's balls.

69 When you get roped into going to the super-cool, very VIP “party” where you will feel like an alien, you will notice that, although everyone will be falling over themselves to tell you how very “CEO” they are and what a fuck-off big car they've “got”, the most interesting and even attractive people will all be gathered around you.

70 You will feel Anubistic wonder and amazement, because all you were doing was talking about how much you love playing the bagpipes.

71 It will seem absurd to you, because you won't immediately grasp how interesting you are when you talk about your bagpipes compared with all the boring CEO-dickheads around you.

72 In the world of work it is exactly the same: grow as much as you can, in the sense of never stopping putting passion into everything you do, keep your Anubistic humility, and the market will value you far more than you can imagine.

And what if it doesn't value you as much as you'd like?

73 Play the bagpipes more, adoring Anubis.

74 You might discover that what you really wanted, after producing enough wealth to support yourself and working hard at your own growth, was simply to have ten more minutes to play the bagpipes.

75 The Anubist warrior fights against himself to improve, he does not fight against others to “look like the best”.